Sabbatical Week One

 Posted on Sep 8, 2019  |  895 words

Sabbatical week one is complete, and I’m finally finding some time to blog about it! I had a pretty active week. It started with hurricane preparations as Dorian burled toward Florida, however in the end we suffered a very light glancing blow. In short, we got off easy. The Bahamas did not get so lucky, however, and got pretty messed up. I’d love for you to take a moment to donate to their recovery here: https://www. [Read More]
career  workplace  stack overflow  culture 

Sabbatical Begins

 Posted on Aug 31, 2019  |  419 words

One of the most amazing perks of working at Stack Overflow is the sabbatical. After 5 years of FT employment, you are entitled to 20 paid days off (outside of normal vacation) that you can spend however you please. My sabbatical officially begins on Tuesday (as Monday is a holiday). Practically speaking, I am out from Aug 31 - Sept 30, returning to work Oct 1st. This is an amazing opportunity and benefit, and I can’t thank Stack Overflow enough for how well they treat employees. [Read More]
career  workplace  stack overflow  culture 

Dev Team Interactions: Conducting Good Code Reviews

 Posted on Jan 27, 2017  |  1141 words

In part 2 of my series on dev team interactions, I’d like to talk about conducting good code reviews. Most dev teams will find themselves in a situation where code reviews are necessary, and in my experience many do them very poorly. I’ve even worked in companies that had such a negative code review culture that people left the review sessions upset, even considering quitting. With a few easy adjustments, you can quickly learn to conduct excellent and positive code reviews with your team. [Read More]
attitude  behavior  culture  process  workplace 

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 

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 

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 

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 

On Credentialism In Software Development

 Posted on Dec 29, 2014  |  1523 words

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]
career  credentialism  culture  interviews  workplace