Articles tagged 'career'

The Urban Legend of the 10X Developer

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You’ll often hear folks claim that it’s well-researched that some developers are ten times (or twenty-seven times! Or more!) as productive as the median developer. They often refer these gifted folks as “10x developers.”

The “well-researched” part is garbage. Completely wrong. There are some studies...

What Do They Mean When They Ask if Rails is Dead?

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...

How to Encourage a Blogging Culture at your Company

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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.

Brian Brushwood: the Day Teller Gave Me the Secret to My Career in Magic

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.

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