Dev Team Interactions: Accountability & Blame

 Posted on Jan 20, 2017  |  962 words

As a developer working for a company, you probably work on a team. The interactions on these teams are sometimes pleasant, and other times hostile. What’s interesting to me is that a lot of the time, a hostile interaction could have been a pleasant one if only approached differently. Hostile teams are created by the actions of the people on them, not by the situations they encounter. One such hostile action is blame. [Read More]
attitude  career  culture  workplace 

Custom ASP.NET MVC Action Result Cache Attribute

 Posted on Jan 10, 2017  |  1041 words

If you’re working on an application built using ASP.NET MVC, you’re hopefully aware of the OutputCacheAttribute attribute which can be used to statically cache your dynamic web pages. By adding this attribute to a controller or action method, the output of the method(s) will be stored in memory. For example, if your action method renders a view, then the view page will be cached in memory. This cached view page is then available to the application for all subsequent requests (or until the item expires out of the cache), which can retrieve it from the memory rather than redoing the work to re-create the result again. [Read More]
dotnet  caching  mvc  performance  programming 

Our Industry Needs Compassion

 Posted on Jan 3, 2017  |  822 words

Well, I’ve utterly failed to blog at regular intervals, writing only three posts in 2016. Ouch. To be fair, one of those posts is insanely famous (the one about NPM and left-pad.js), but still, I’ve really let my readers – and myself – down. So, I resolve to write a blog post every single week of 2017, starting today. This will probably mean that I write slightly shorter posts, and maybe even multi-part series posts. [Read More]
attitude  behavior  culture  workplace 

Let's Talk About Rock Stars & Egos

 Posted on Jun 17, 2016  |  809 words

On Plumbers Picture this situation: you woke up this morning to find that there’s no water coming through your valves and taps. No sink water. No shower water. Having no plumbing experience, you call around for a plumber. Plumber #1 Plumber #1, let’s call him Mario, tells you he can’t be bothered to come check out your issue because it’s minor and he’s very important and too busy for it. You explain that you really need a plumber, and he explains he’ll do it for 1. [Read More]
attitude  behavior  culture  ego  workplace 

NPM & left-pad: Have We Forgotten How To Program?

 Posted on Mar 23, 2016  |  930 words

Intro Okay developers, time to have a serious talk. As you are probably already aware, this week React, Babel, and a bunch of other high-profile packages on NPM broke. The reason they broke is rather astounding: A simple NPM package called left-pad that was a dependency of their code. left-pad, at the time of writing this, has 11 stars on GitHub. The entire package is 11 simple lines that implement a basic left-pad string function. [Read More]
left-pad  npm  packages  programming 

Developer Compensation: Stack Overflow Doesn't Stack Rank

 Posted on Feb 26, 2016  |  2269 words

Are Developers Good Negotiators? Developers come from all walks of life, and have many unique interests, passions, and hobbies. Often the only thing that developers have in common is their love for programming. It follows that some are good negotiators; others get the double digit percentage finance rate at the dealership when they go in to buy that new car. How Does Your Company Determine Compensation? When you hire developers, how do you decide on their salary? [Read More]
compensation  salary  stack overflow  transparency 

Diversity Is Really Freaking Hard

 Posted on Sep 24, 2015  |  2182 words

Background I’m going to discuss an important topic that affects everybody in tech: diversity. No, this won’t be some preachy post about how diversity is great and how you should be a better human being. Rather, I’m going to tell you about the things I’ve experienced working on diversity – particularly the interesting events of the last few days that happened internally at Stack Overflow. It’s no secret that the tech industry is not that diverse. [Read More]
conflict  culture  diversity  mistakes  workplace 

Developer Turned Manager

 Posted on Aug 3, 2015  |  1768 words

In February of 2015, I was promoted to Engineering Manager at Stack Overflow. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. There are tons of things I’ve learned so far, some of which I’ve learned the hard way. There’s also a world of difference between managing code, and managing people who code. Your day to day work routine changes completely. You define success differently. [Read More]
career  lessons  management  mistakes  promotion 

Developers Shouldn't Measure Twice, Cut Once

 Posted on Apr 15, 2015  |  795 words

I was working on my fireplace this past weekend. Specifically I had just finished ripping down the old surface to the red brick, and then preparing the brick surface with a layer of thinset for tiling. I spent all of Saturday cutting tiles and then placing them on the fireplace surround and hearth. Even with help it took 11 hours to do, and about 8 hours of it was measuring and cutting tiles. [Read More]
culture  iteration  methodology  mistakes  process 

On Secretly Terrible Engineers - A Rebuttal

 Posted on Mar 9, 2015  |  2622 words

Today an article was brought to my attention. One that, at the time of writing this post, had hit the front page of various sites (including Hacker News) and had been shared over 2,600 times. The article is On Secretly Terrible Engineers, which is a criticism of the tech industry and the mentality which it holds towards hiring both new and experienced developers/engineers. Spoiler: I strongly disagree with most of this article. [Read More]
analysis  commentary  culture  rebuttal