The Recruiting Competitive Advantage

A Job Listing Let’s say you were walking down a street one day and noticed an ad for help wanted. It is posted in the window of a bakery. It reads: HELP WANTED: Need a baker for FT work. Must be familiar with modern baking methods such as ovens, barbecuing, and deep fryers. 5+ years experience with the Super 6 commercial baking oven required (aside: came out in 2014). Nice to haves include experience with butcher’s blocks, chopping meat, and making candles. [Read More]

On Credentialism In Software Development

Intro We’re just two days from a brand new year and yet the primary measurement of a developer’s skill seems to be the same as it was 20 years ago. The most important classification to most companies is job title, as I talked about in great detail in my last post. The job title is acquired via working for a veritable slough of credentialist companies whose HR departments break it down very simply: [Read More]

The Trouble With Job Titles

Intro I’ve had a good career so far. I began working full-time as a programmer in 2008. At that time my title was Junior Developer. I had a decent boss and cool co-workers, and I cut my teeth on Java and .NET. It was a good experience. After 2 years at that gig, I felt that it was time to move on. I contacted recruiters, and one eventually found me a promotion: Systems Analyst. [Read More]

iPhone 6: Style Over Substance

Intro Like many of you, today I watched the Apple media event in which they announced both the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch. I’m not going to talk about the watch, but instead about the phone. For years Apple has been a true cachet brand. They are a luxury item that is sought after for status and image. I don’t blame anyone for owning an iPhone: they’re reasonably sexy and you get to show off the Apple branding. [Read More]

How I Got A Job At Stack Exchange

Intro Almost exactly 1 month ago today I found myself on a video call with Joel Spolsky. It feels insane to write that, even now, as it was a banner moment in my career. For me it was the equivalent of meeting a movie star who I had idolized since I was old enough to know what movies were. There had always been this Joel Spolsky guy throughout my career that I regularly read about and whose opinions on software development agreed with mine, and suddenly I was talking with him face to face. [Read More]

How To Guarantee Dev Team Failure

The Problem I think that most devs would agree when I state that the definition of success in the corporate world of development places less emphasis on “good” code and more emphasis on “working” code. Working code is code that can be released to production on or before the deadline, regardless of performance or even bugs in most cases. As a developer, you ultimately feel as if you’ve failed when you toil for nights on end to meet steep deadlines and churn out crappy code. [Read More]

To Node.js Or Not To Node.js

Intro Node.js – it has rapidly become the “new hotness” in the tech start-up realm. With each passing day, the fan base of Node lovers grows larger, spreading their rhetoric like a religion. How do you spot a Node.js user? Don’t worry, they’ll let you know. One day you’re at a regular user group meeting, sipping soda and talking with some colleagues, when the subject turns to Node. “Have you guys tried Node. [Read More]

C# Probably Getting New "Safe Navigation" Operator "?."

It looks as if the Visual Studio dev team may be implementing a new operator in a future .NET release. This is due in large part to community demand, which is pretty cool because it shows that the VS team is listening to their customer base; a key part of a successful product. This new operator is likely going to take the syntax of ?. and is known as the Safe Navigation Operator. [Read More]

Trigger IValidatableObject.Validate When ModelState.IsValid is false

I recently came across an ASP.NET MVC issue at work where the validation for my Model was not firing correctly. The Model implemented the IValidatableObject interface and thus the Validate method which did some specific logic to ensure the state of the Model (the ModelState). This Model also had some DataAnnotation attributes on it to validate basic input. Long story short, the issue I encountered was that when ModelState.IsValid == false due to failure of the DataAnnotation validation, the IValidatableObject. [Read More]