You've found my corner of the internet! I opine on various topics that interest me (mostly tech, startups & the like). Stick around and enjoy yourself!
The software industry sucks at interviews. Most companies don’t have a standardized way of comparing candidates and those that do don’t put much thought into them. It’s usually convening the hiring panel and getting a thumbs-up from everyone. This means that the job of an interviewee is not to demonstrate that they have the skills needed for the job at hand. Instead, an interviewee’s primary goal…
I was involved in a recent chat conversation around the concept of “Culture Buddies.” The idea is to help onboard new employees by having a current employee assigned to them with the specific task of helping the new employee acclimate to the company’s culture. I had a direct and immediate dislike of the idea. (Note: this is different from finding a trusted friend at a company to help you navigate…
You’ve seen the hype around TypeScript and are wondering exactly how these types help us programmers out. If you’ve made it this far into your career without learning about intuitionistic type theory or what T = ∃X { a: X; f: (X → int); } means, that’s just fine. There are plenty of fantastic languages out there that don’t require knowing what a “type” is, so it’s possible to get quite far without…
In my developer career, I don’t think I’ve met anything as revolutionary as TypeScript . There are plenty of shoulders TypeScript is standing on (everyone who worked to get JS devs to accept build systems!) but TypeScript is a brilliant cumulation of that work that’s fundamentally changed how I do my job. So much so, that I finally switched off my beloved Sublime Text to Visual Studio Code for…
I’m just finishing the last stages of writing Building Reactive Websites with RxJS , to be published through Pragmatic Publishing. I’m a huge fan of RxJS, even if it is a bit complicated to get used to. In an effort to demystify this library, I’d like to walk through a few case studies over the next few weeks and analyze how to use it in real-world scenarios. The first case study comes from one of…
Any programmer worth their salt is willing to help team members out when they’re in a pinch. Software development is a team sport, after all. Unfortunately, management can often completely miss the point and create perverse incentives that wreck a team’s cooperation and communication. If you’re a software manager, here’s a quick self test: Put together a list of all of your incentives, from…
So far in the calculords series we’ve accomplished: Part 1: Solving a level of Calculords in sub-sandwich time Part 2: Building an API between Calculords and our code Despite what your college might have taught you, there’s another layer beyond all the Big-O notation the ivory tower academics like to squawk on about: O(sandwich). Specifically, if I run this code, do I have time to go make myself a…
Originally, I wasn’t going to respond but I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for startup founders. If you don’t mind, here’s some unsolicited advice on recruiting: When I’m looking for a job, I have three big questions in mind: Will I have autonomy to do the best job I can? Can I explore new areas instead of doing the same job over and over again? Will the pay & total compensation be enough so I…
The core unit of git is the commit. A commit is simple on the surface (some code changes and a message). Such simplicity belies the complexity within. When to commit I’ve heard many opinions on when one should commit from “commit early, commit often” to “one commit per release” (yikes).The only method I’ve found that consistently reduces developer headaches is to make one commit per change.This…
When we last left off , we had a handy-dandy algorithm that used dynamic programming to find the optimal solution to a Calculords level in a sane amount of time. The biggest downside was that I still needed to manually transfer a bunch of numbers from the screen to the algorithm, and then painstakingly tap the results back into the phone, one by one. Since there was a puny meatbag involved, there…