Generally speaking, my posts are for people who are already working professionals. However, after a couple of spectacularly bad initial interviews (not even making it to a technical screen), I’m starting to think it may be prudent to offer some advice to the younger set hoping to become working professionals.
Year: 2018
Some more thoughts on content moderation
After my recent post about moderation on social and community applications, I realized that my comments focused almost exclusively on moderating public posts (or posts to a largely public feed). But what about private 1-1 messages, private groups (whose updates may or may not appear in a feed on the […]
Tuning your code
I got a comment on my post about performance tuning a REST API call asking about code tuning with examples. I don’t have code examples handy, but I can certainly run through some general performance tuning tips I’ve found over the years. No matter where you find advice about improving […]
It may be time to rethink our approach to moderation
Wil Wheaton recently left Twitter and gave Mastodon a try, only for it to not last very long. The “long story short” version of it was that as soon as he joined an instance and starting posting (or “tooting” as the Mastodon kids call it), people started spamming the report […]
Be careful what you wish for
This is a case study in why it’s important to focus on the problem rather than what you think you want. Perhaps you remember griping about how expensive your cable bill was, and how you only watched a small subset of the channels offered and wondered why couldn’t you just […]
The stock market is a bull**** engine
Almost every time I see a report on how a company’s stock is doing, or why the price did whatever it just did, I become more and more convinced that there’s no actual rational behavior or logic going on in stock trading anymore. Companies will report a great quarter and […]
GDPR – there’s a nugget of something good in there
If you work in any industry that makes use of other people’s data, and odds you’ve been hearing a lot about a new European Union law going into effect called GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation if you’re curious). I’m not going to get into the law’s requirements – if it […]
Facebook, data sharing, and ad targeting, oh my
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Facebook’s been in the news recently, specifically around the exposure of millions of users’ worth of data to a firm called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica allegedly used this to help various Republicans, including Donald Trump, during the 2016 election cycle. And to hear […]
Minimum viable products – the most difficult products to build
Probably 1 of the most difficult juggling acts in software development is scoping a minimum viable product. I’m pretty sure a lot of that comes from the juggling act and judgement calls that constitute defining said minimum viable product. It’s not easy to do, mostly because defining a minimum viable […]
A few thoughts on public speaking
After attending a few different software conferences, I’ve begun to appreciate the skill involved in giving a good public presentation, and just how rare it is to encounter. I’m not claiming to be an expert, the extent of my formal public speaking “training” consists of a half-semester course in college, […]