Recent content in rc3.org Archive on RC3.org
This is another guest post by Claude Code, following up on the Hugo migration story . It’s been about a month since we launched the Hugo-based RC3.org. Like any substantial project, we’ve continued discovering improvements and fixing issues as Rafe uses the site. Here’s what we’ve been working on. Search: The Big Addition The most significant post-launch feature was adding…
This is a guest post by Claude Code, the AI coding assistant that helped with RC3.org’s migration to Hugo. Hi! I’m Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding assistant. Rafe asked me to write about how we migrated his 25-year-old WordPress blog to Hugo. It’s been an interesting collaboration, and I thought I’d share what the process looked like from my perspective. The…
In 2013, I wrote a post on how continuous deployment helps developers avoid getting stuck . Figuring out that you’re stuck and how to get unstuck is probably the single most important thing you can do as a developer to improve your own productivity. Friend of the blog Camille Fournier just published a post on the same topic that I really enjoyed – How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? A Primer…
I’ve started publishing a newsletter, which is not unlike a blog except that I send it out via email. I’m still trying to come up with the best strategy for publishing the things I’m writing in the newsletter to the blog, but I haven’t gotten there yet. In the meantime, you can subscribe to the newsletter at TinyLetter . There’s an archive as well.
I’ve been watching the Brexit debate in the UK with interest for months, but I never really believed the British public would vote Leave when it came down to it. I thought it would turn out like the Scottish independence referendum , and that in the end people would not vote for total chaos. Obviously, I was wrong. Here are some links to articles that make the most sense to me. The Telegraph…
Some years ago, one-on-ones went from being an oddity to the keystone of progressive management. I’ll give credit to Michael Lopp , who wrote about them back in 2010. I’ve had (literally) thousands of one-on-ones at this point, and I can’t imagine a world in which they aren’t the backbone of an engaged professional relationship. This week, though, I learned of yet another reason why they’re really…
My favorite recent management post is about “ radical candor .” It’s the way you give feedback when you care about someone personally and you are willing to challenge them directly. I don’t want to steal the best content of the post (especially the two by two matrix that describes alternatives to radical candor that are problematic), you should go and read it. Even though…
If there’s one person who I feel really said the things that need to be said in 2015, it was Maciej Cegłowski. He gave a number of talks last year, and posted transcripts of them so that we can all read them and get smarter. The theme is common across all of them – that preserving a Web we can be optimistic about is going to take work and directed effort.
One question I’ve been grappling with lately as we’ve been interviewing manager candidates has been, how much programming do we expect an engineering manager to do? It’s an important question, because most engineering managers started out as engineers, and most engineers got into the profession to write code. In a recent post, Cate Huston gets at why it’s difficult letting go : There’s something…
Have I really not written a blog post since October? It’s probably worth discussing what’s been going on with my blog for the past four years or so, and why I’ve been so much less prolific in recent years than I was in years prior. One answer came to me not long ago when one of my colleagues asked on Twitter about the value of blogging. After thinking about it, I realized that one of the big…
Here’s the reading list to accompany my Monktoberfest talk on just culture, blameless post mortems, and local rationality. The talk was very much inspired by Sidney Dekker’s fantastic book The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error . Here’s a short video where he explains Just Culture . There’s also a PDF of an old edition of the book available online. The rationale and methodology for post…
Kellan Elliott-McCrea, the CTO of Etsy for my entire time at the company, writes about the theories under which Etsy’s engineering team, as we know it, was constructed. It has traveled a whole lot further than he could have predicted: Five years ago, continuous deployment was still a heretical idea. The idea you could do it with over 250 engineers was, to me at least, literally unimaginable.…
If you are a person who is responsible for interviewing engineers, or more importantly, running an interview process for engineers, you should drop everything and read Ann Harter’s discussion of interviews through the lens of research psychology. It’s also useful for people who are the subjects of interviews and are surprised by the way their brains work in interview situations. As an…
Here in management-land, the New York Times story on workplace culture at Amazon has been the talk of Twitter for the past few days. The story paints an ugly picture of hyper-competitiveness, unreasonable demands, and exploitation that have caused many people to recoil (and some others to applaud). I’m certain that the article isn’t comprehensive. It probably isn’t even fair.…
I love Twitter, but I’ve been unhappy with the company since they made the decision to stop supporting third party clients that compete with their own native clients. There are still some good ones available, but Twitter has actively discouraged the development of new clients by not adding third party API support for many new features, and by limiting the supply of API keys to client…
I’m sad to see the site This Is My Jam shut down , I found it to be a pretty fun way to share a little music with people you know from Twitter and to be a good source of inspiration for new music to try. In shutting down, they are setting the standard for how social sites should be taken offline in an ideal world. The details: This Is My Jam will become a read-only time capsule in September.…
Last fall, when I was interviewing intern candidates, one thing I noticed was that many of them told a similar story – when they needed to acquire a new skill, they watched tutorials and lectures on YouTube. One had an internship the previous summer working on a C++ project, and she told me that she watched C++ videos every morning before work in order to get up to speed quickly.
Despite this, "best" does not mean "impregnable". The FBI claims that iPhones are "bricks" containing no useful information and Apple claims that iMessage is "end-to-end" secure. Neither is the case. In iPhones, the FBI, and Going Dark , security researcher explains which threats an iPhone protects you from. As a device, it's secure, but how you use it determines how much information you expose.…
Fred Wilson wrote a blog post about employee retention that includes these sentences: >There are highly loyal teams that can withstand almost anything and remain steadfastly behind their leader. And there are teams that are entirely mercenary and will walk out without thinking twice about it. One of the big responsibilities for any manager is to keep their team together, and obviously cultivating…
In a piece discussing the horrible effects mean bosses have on the health and productivity of people at work, Christine Porath also catalogs a couple of excuses that these bosses use: I’ve surveyed hundreds of people across organizations spanning more than 17 industries, and asked people why they behaved uncivilly. Over half of them claim it is because they are overloaded, and more than 40 percent…
Watch Yahoo’s security chief Alex Stamos talk about the state of application security AppSec is Eating Security . Brilliant, wide-ranging talk.
The Daily Beast reports on Uber’s argument that it is exempt from disability laws, because it’s a tech company rather than a transportation company. The other day I wrote about Uber , and I still have complicated thoughts about the company. What I think is that the market is full of companies that seek to save money by evading regulation, and it’s up to us as voters to elect…
Trevor Timm tells the media to quit dismissing Seymour Hersh and to start following up on his reporting on the holes in the official account of how the CIA found Osama Bin Laden. While there are many elements of Hersh’s story that seem implausible, some details of the official account are implausible as well. The implications of the differences between the official’s account and Hersh’s reporting…
This week’s don’t miss article is Emily Guendelsberger’s look at what Uber drivers really make for the Philadelpha City Paper. The article is well-researched and well-reported. It’s also an entertaining read. Even if you don’t use Uber at all, its business model is being emulated throughout the service industry, and the company’s future is tightly entertwined with the future of ground…
Here’s one thing I think about when I’m evaluating candidates after interviewing them – do I want to have 100 one on ones with this person? One hundred one on ones is roughly two years, which is probably roughly the minimum amount of time you’d expect someone to work with someone, assuming it isn’t a disaster. To me, this question is a reminder of the commitment one makes to a person’s…
Here’s the answer to a question I always had, what shows like The Daily Show use to catalog the video clips they use. Their ability to put together segments containing salient clips from years of past footage consistently amazes. Turns out, there’s a server appliance called SnapStream that records and organizes the content.
Accomplishing big things takes a long time, even in the modern world of software. I was reminded of that today when I read Mike Kruzeniski’s post Jony’s Patience . Here’s the crux of it: I doubt that it took 20 years for Ive to come up with the idea for the Watch, or to find the right design for it. For the past two decades, Apple and Ive have been carefully building a company that’s capable of…
One thing that becomes apparent as you progress through a career in software engineering is that the hiring process for software engineers is pretty bad across the entire industry. Some companies are vastly better than others, but in general, most don’t even do much work to evaluate the overall effectiveness of their hiring process. What I liked most about Thomas Ptacek’s post on what they’ve…
It’s been a month since my last link blog post. That’s terrible. Why is Google interested in owning the entire “.dev” top level domain? Business Insider has a long piece on the downfall of Fab and its CEO. He turned a bad idea (yet another social network) into a good idea (flash sales of interesting goods) and then implemented a strategy that wasted tons of money and ultimately killed the company.…
Originally I was just going to post a link to Jon Ronson’s New York Times piece on the tendency of people on the Internet in general and Twitter in particular to pile on . His piece is mostly about Justine Sacco, who famously posted an offensive (and possibly widely misconstrued) tweet before her 11 hour flight took off, and landed to potentially the most epic pile on in recent memory. I had lots…
Two attempts to define the job of a CTO, one by Camille Fournier , from Rent the Runway, and one from Greg Brockman , from Stripe. The bottom line from Camille: My advice for aspiring CTOs is to remember that it’s a business strategy job, first and foremost. It’s also a management job. If you don’t care about the business your company is running, if you’re not willing to take ultimate…
(by way of @scienceporn ) The news story of the week is the Greek elections that put the left wing anti-austerity Syriza into power. The Economist has a useful article on the implications for the broader Euro-zone . As Paul Krugman explains, the austerity measures Greece has imposed at the behest of the institutions that bailed it out have been ruinous for the Greek people. The best overall…
Look, it’s a blog post full of links! In the New York Times, Scott Shane reviews Guantánamo Diary , which is in fact the diary of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who has been detained at Gitmo without charges since 2002. An attempt to definitively answer the popular interview question, What happens when you enter an address in your browser? , by Alex Gaynor. For some reason, it never occurred to me that…
I have a couple of long posts in the works. The first is some thoughts on Peter Seibel’s essay on feedback from a manager’s perspective. The other is a post that I started writing on Martin Luther King Day but didn’t finish. Today I caught Jason Kottke’s post on link blogging , and it got me thinking about links as well. While I don’t publish as many posts as I once did, for a number of reasons, I…
Everybody is talking about the New York Times op-ed, Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others , because everybody wants to talk about the fact that it says research shows that teams with more women perform better. My anecdotal experience aligns with the research, but I want to talk about another point that the article makes. Here’s a snippet: Online and off, some teams consistently worked…
Matt Mullenweg of WordPress on Paul Graham’s argument that we the government needs to grant far more U.S. visas for software engineers: I agree that the US deserves dramatically better immigration policies, but in the meantime I’m confused with the head-in-the-sand approach most tech companies are taking simultaneously complaining that there are lots of great people they can’t bring into the US,…
I’ve read two really excellent posts about hiring engineers lately. Both of them are aimed at adding nuance to the discussion of “hiring the best.” The first, from Cate Huston in Model View Culture takes this on directly in her essay, We Hire the Best . Here’s her rephrasing of “hiring the best”: Among people we know, we hire “the best” (as determined by our subjective process), who are willing…
Code of Ages Scott Rosenberg talks about Go, Swift, and how big companies bring new programming languages into the world. If nothing else, worth reading as an excellent example of how you write about software development for a non-technical audience.
Luke O’Neal in the Washington Post on Black Friday and how it is advertised: It’s hard to avoid the message of those ads. We’ve been bombarded with them for weeks now, from corporations eager to entice shoppers with so-called “door-buster” deals. And then, once the shopping public falls for them, a privileged segment of the population sits back and dehumanizes them for its collective…
Vagrant is one of those things I hear people talking about but that I’ve never gotten around to playing with, or hadn’t gotten around to playing with until today. Vagrant is a solution to the problem of setting up a local development environment for Web development. Depending on the platform you use, this can be rather difficult. I don’t even want to think about Windows…
Re/code made news this week by eliminating comments on the site, noting that most of the discussion about their articles was happening elsewhere. In the larger scheme of things, “Don’t read the comments” is widely regarded as universally good advice. This makes me more interested in sites with healthy communities of commenters. As far as I can tell, comments are as good as the…
A couple of interesting pieces about apps today. In the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims says that apps are killing the Web . John Gruber responds by saying that apps are part of the Web . I’m not terribly interested in this argument. If you care about the longevity of your work, you will publish it on Web pages that can be rendered in a browser. Nobody knows what will happen with apps…
This article in Business Insider is the first media mention I’ve seen discussing the disappearance of referrers on inbound traffic to Web sites. For people who work in analytics, especially on sites that make money by selling advertising, this is a really big deal. In many cases, analytics can be invasive from a privacy standpoint, but referrers generally don’t contain any information…
John Gruber has a piece up about retailers disabling NFC at checkout to prevent customers from checking out using Apple Pay. Retailers are intentionally degrading the customer experience in order to retain the ability to collect data about their customers’ habits. This tradeoff is near and dear to me, as analytics is currently a huge part of my job. What I’d like to know is,…
These days, if you want attentive customer service from most companies, the most direct route is to complain about the company on Twitter in such a way that your tweet shows up in the company’s mentions. It doesn’t matter whether your cable is working poorly, you had problems rebooking a flight, or your iPhone app didn’t work as well as you expected, Twitter is the place to seek relief. This is a…
There’s a debate raging over the news that mobile devices will soon be encrypted using keys that are fully under the owner’s control. The government, of course, hates this idea. Law enforcement feels like they should be able to decrypt anything if they want to. This is not a new debate – there was a huge debate over key escrow in the 90’s. Here are a few pointers to pieces…
I’m not usually a big fan of listicles, but I do recommend this one: Top 10 Ways To Be a Male Advocate for Technical Women , from the National Center for Women & Information Technology. What I particularly like about it is that it focuses on things that we can be doing right now to improve the professional prospects of women that we work with.
In Trouble at the Koolaid Point Kathy Sierra talks about her experience with online harassment, and more recently, the degree to which people are willing to forgive and forget the past misdeeds of her harassers. She also talks about the wide variety of pernicious lies that have been told about her that have reached such wide circulation that she can’t really shake them, and how those lies…
Blameless post-mortems are one of the most notable (and perhaps most misunderstood) features of Etsy’s engineering culture. John Allspaw wrote about them on Code as Craft back in May, 2012. In it, he talks about human errors and the “Bad Apple theory,” which is that the best way to eliminate error is to eliminate the “bad apples” who introduce error. Most of the time, when we talk about blameless…
Today I got around to listening to the A Not So Simple Majority episode of This American Life. The story is about the school board in East Ramapo in New York, where a group of people who all send their children to private religious schools took over the public school board, and have since been gutting the public school system and funneling the money to their private schools. The religion of the…