Thoughts, stories, and ideas in Tech
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — Clarke’s Law #3 Technology is always in a cycle of abstraction/simplification as complex systems are standardized. My grandfather is one of the three people on the variable magnetron patent that helped microwaves become mainstream. He
Macros in elixir are one of the more challenging concepts to understand, and many people simply say "don't use them" because of this. The key to understanding macros is to also understand a little of how compilers work. Compilers, Bytecode, Transpiling Code comes in several levels,
I was talking to a friend once, and he referenced the Inventions Agreement one must sign to work for a company as a form of modern Indentured Servitude. I may not agree entirely, but it is an interesting and common perspective shared by engineers. A constant challenge faced by software
Identity management, Authentication, and Authorization is hard for many people to understand. But it doesn't have to be, if you take a few minutes to understand the core principles: Identification - Who do you claim to be? - Your Username Authentication - Can you prove you are that
To ask a software developer for an estimate is often a source of serious friction—some people would rather have their teeth drilled. Estimating technology delivery is one of the more challenging problems we face in tech. Have you ever felt it's easier to just double the
Like Sisyphus, damned to push an enormous boulder up a hill each day only to watch it roll back down, those of us in the Technology industry are compelled with a similar burden in the way we used to manage software, in the world of monolithic/waterfall software delivery —
People go through an interesting cycle when they first start using Slack (or any team chat tool). Slack is very powerful in that it finally brings the immediacy of SMS texting and connects it to the computer and all of your devices in a unified interface. However, if not used
How do you know if you have somebody good at tech, or if they are just good at faking it ? This is a frequent problem many tech managers are faced with. If you aren't technical, how can you tell the quality people from the fakers? In many other
The format of your meeting, or how you run the discussion, is more important than you may think. With design and technology people, it is important that meetings and communication happen in a productive manner because they can easily digress with different personality types. Meetings are critical to good communication
Simon Sinek succinctly captures many leadership challenges faced today in his talk on Empathy and Perspective. This is an even greater challenge in the Technology Industry! A few points that resonate: 1:30 - taking care of people in our charge, not being in charge 7:32 - What Empathy
With the challenges facing Ruby and Rails, many are finding Elixir as a good alternative, especially considering performance and concurrency. But this isn't just because it is somehow faster--while it is more memory efficient, better with streams, parallel processing and concurrency than Ruby the gains are actually simply
The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a powerful tool to help scope work at any level – when used properly. But it is usually mis-understood (everybody does work breakdowns, right?); and perhaps because it is listed in an outline format, many consider it a waterfall tool. See also: the Agile
Using the OS Environment to configure your containers is an insecure practice, and we need to stop encouraging people to do it! The 12-factor app says to use the running Environment of a container to configure your running service. I would contend this does not mandate OS Environment variables, but
Work culture is far more critical to our success than work environment, yet it is more often glossed over because it deals with the problematic interpersonal challenges that are never easy to resolve. Have you considered the difference?
Price's law observes that from any given group, half of the work is done by a minor fraction of the whole (specifically 50% of the work is done by a square root of the body). Jordan Peterson calls this fractional subset the horrible people, for who else could