Engineering leader on a mission to help product teams love their job and consistently deliver real customer value.
In software product development, we've historically specialized in ways that may not make sense going forward. But there will always be a need for people who deeply understand our customers' most important problems, solve those problems with high-quality software, and run that software reliably in production. This is the work that endures.
If AI can one day quickly and reliably write new code and edit existing code to produce the intended new behavior of the software system, such that the system itself effectively becomes a black box… there's a whole slew of things that don't matter anymore.
Unless...
You can't. It's not possible. I know that sounds like an outrageous claim given the popularity of the Active Record pattern, but it's true.
Bitcoin is revolutionary. It may not happen immediately, but eventually you won't be able to ignore it. There will be a gravity to it, an incentive to be a part of it. Those who don’t use it will put themselves at a disadvantage... At some point, it actually takes more work to ignore the innovation.
High-quality software is both valuable to the business now and easy to change later. While it’s simple to be dogmatic at either end of this spectrum, both goals are important to the business in the long run. Aiming for highly cohesive and loosely coupled code is key to finding the balance, but this concept can be tough to understand at first glance. So what does it actually mean?
There's something that's been on my mind a lot lately: the significance of meaningful boundaries. It's a theme that keeps coming up wherever I look.
Say goodbye to cargo cult solutions. Finally get a grasp on character set encoding, learn how it works for PHP apps and MySQL, and become confident in fixing encoding issues once and for all.
While working on a project recently, I finally got so frustrated with the awkward way validation errors are typically handled that I was determined to figure out a solution.
There's one particularly slippery term that wreaks havoc in the pursuit of application security: _Sanitize_.
Video of my talk at [EEConf 2017](http://2017.eeconf.com/) in Denver.
If you want to make a difference in software, get better at modernizing legacy applications. The tech world is desperately in need of such skills, and it’s only gonna get more dire from here.
Data is in service to the purpose. It isn’t the purpose itself.
In a word: sanity.
It's one of the most continually pervasive security threats. It continues to top the OWASP security risk list. Yet somehow many developers still don't even know what it is.
Wow, my last post got way more attention than I expected! There was the expected amount of snark, to be sure, but there was also some genuine misunderstanding and confusion about a few things, so let's clear them up.
I've got a challenge for you. The next time you start a new project, try *not* using a PHP framework.
A contrast that perfectly captures the mindset of great leaders.
The human nervous system can only process about 110 bits of information per second.
We've been taught to think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re even worth doing in the first place.
You never intended to run a burn-out shop, but here we are.
In the world of design and development, your team’s getting a *lot* thrown at it. It’s true if you’re running a software shop responsible for churning out a single product, and it’s *especially* problematic for digital agencies with multiple clients. But when everything’s an emergency, nothing is.
For any brick-and-mortar business, it's a major problem if your customers can't find you.
My first foray into entrepreneurship was surprisingly successful. At least it started that way.