I’m sure you’ve seen many articles asking, “is Rails dead?” and “is Ruby dead?”… Indeed, you’ll see them for any technology old enough to have a real userbase, even technologies that are still growing.
I’m not here today to answer whether Ruby or Rails is dead. Instead, I’m here to explain why people...
In March, I wrote about the UK’s Global Talent Visa and how, as a coder, it probably meant you could get long-term residence in the UK even working for yourself.
Recently Geoffrey Robichaux asked me great questions about it. He even agreed I could post them here! I’ll share his questions and my answers...
I’ve been asking a lot of coders about how they got where they got. I have a personal interest in that long slump in the ‘senior engineer’ section of our career, but there are all sorts of fascinating stories along the way.
Andy Neely is on my...
You know the Golden Child Engineer, the favourite of the Director of Engineering? He’s that guy (and it’s basically always a guy) who’s the company Teacher’s Pet? The software developer who gets promotion after promotion?
You’re not that guy. With one fun exception, I haven’t been either. And I’ve...
Her nose wrinkled. “I really hate job hunting.” He looked down, but her chicken curry seemed fine.
“How come?”
“The interviewer is trying to seem smarter than you. The questions are stupid and you’ve already heard them or you haven’t. It’s not like those are really things you do on the job.”
“Huh...
(This visa used to be called the Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa and is now called the Global Talent visa. Same thing.)
People ask me why I moved to Inverness. Lots of reasons, of course. But one thing that seriously helped was a flexible visa to get me and my family into the United Kingdom. One reason...
A few months ago, a CTO at a conference asked me, “how do you encourage a blogging culture at your company?” I’m a reasonable fellow to ask. Not only have I written a huge amount for AppFolio’s engineering blog and encouraged other AppFolio engineers to do so, I also did something similar at OnLive with even more success. By “more success” I don’t mean the blog was more popular (it wasn’t,) but that about half the posts were written by engineers other than me, which is the hard part. Writing a lot is all well and good. Getting other people to write a lot is an accomplishment.
The hard part isn’t getting a few posts started. The hard part is blogging with any regularity. And it is hard. But there are some things you can do to make it easier.
Rands recently wrote a post called “Your Culture is Rotting”. The short version is that he thinks if people are nervous about HR, it’s a sign of a culture problem. I partially agree - but I think being nervous about HR is perfectly normal and should be expected. It’s the degree of nervousness. Here...
This isn’t really my blog post – it’s Brian Brushwood’s. But as his blog slowly, visibly decays, it makes me want to keep a copy somewhere I’m sure I can find it. So, here it is:
Hey gang,
Lately a lot of young magicians have been asking me for advice, which has caused me to remember one of the most valuable correspondences of my life: one of the most mind-blowing letters I ever received, chock-full of insights that to this very day guide my career and philosophy in both creating and performing magic.
This is a pretty long post, but with Teller’s permission, I’d like to share with you the secrets he gave me 14 years ago to starting a successful career in magic.
Recently Chad Fowler wrote a great job description for a software engineer. I replied that a person like that is currently un-hireable in Silicon Valley.
Another fellow asked me, how would I change the list for technical instructors rather than straight-up engineers?
And if they offered something...
Recently, John Sonmez wrote about software development, and specifically claimed project managers don’t tend to do anything useful.
To be fair, sometimes he’s right. And you always have to watch out for “meta-work” – telling people what to do instead of doing things.
But I believe project managers...
Hey, tech companies. Hey, engineers working at tech companies.
There’s a great post by Chad Fowler going around with a job description for an engineer we’d all love to work with.
He says he can’t find any of those engineers to hire. Spoiler: neither can your company. I’m going to tell you why not, and what it would take to fix it.
