Much ado has been made about political advertising on sites like Twitter and Facebook since they announced their general policies around the ads, such as Jeff Jarvis’s take Unpopular Decisions and Ben Thompson’s Tech and Liberty. It’s easy to make this about the companies and the applications they offer, and […]
Year: 2019
Managing infrastructure with Terraform
Part of having mature infrastructure management is treating infrastructure as code. If your infrastructure is on a public cloud, Terraform is a good choice for that “code.” It’s platform-agnostic (at least as agnostic as you’re going to get), easy to learn, and easy to run. If you’re coming from something […]
Take the requirements meeting
As I noted in my last post, it’s really easy to hate meetings (I’m certainly not the biggest fan of them either), but that doesn’t mean that all meetings are inherently worthless. Some meetings can help give focus and clarity to your work, and that’s a requirements meeting.
The Truth About “10X Engineers”
A couple of months ago, developers on Twitter started spamming jokes or frustrations about the mythical “10X engineer” in response to this tweet by a startup investor from India. Thankfully, outside of this guy’s original tweet thread, nobody else was buying the “10X engineer” nonsense. Unfortunately, the fact that this […]
Are you shipping usable components?
One of the benefits of using Javascript frameworks like React or Vue is that you can build and export your own custom components. This lets other teams in your organization or even external developers build front-ends that have a consistent look and feel across the board as well as follow […]
The trouble with Redux
Do any research into current front-end development, and you’ll hit React pretty quickly. As far as modern Javascript frameworks go, React is probably the standard Javascript framework used by startups and other companies that haven’t already heavily invested in another front-end framework. While React does a decent job of packaging […]
The universal identity crisis
I’m curious how many people identify with this scenario – to check all of your emails you have flip between at least 2 accounts, maybe even 3. And that’s just emails. There’s also calendars – again 2 of them, maybe 3 if you have a family. Most of us have […]
Is there a future for Java?
I’ve been developing in Java since late 2009. It’s a good language, but I’m starting to wonder what kind of future it has. I’ve been using Java 8 since shortly after it came out, even though Java is currently on version 11. Java’s obviously still being developed, so why not […]
Software should have a strong opinion
Software is written to solve a problem. Sometimes, it’s more than one problem, but you get the idea. Being someone who both uses and writes software, I’ve found the best software out there doesn’t just solve a problem, but was written with a clear and definitive opinion about how that […]
Not everything fits a subscription business model
I’ve worked for *aaS companies for about the last 7 years. Monthly software subscriptions literally pay my mortgage, so I get the benefits of building businesses around predictable monthly payments. But that being said, not every online business lends itself to being subscription-based, and there’s a few companies out there […]