So how’s the whole remote learning thing working out for everybody? That’s a rhetorical question, people have no problem talking about how much they hate the whole setup. I get that parents want their kids to go back to school (or at least give them some peace and quiet while […]
Year: 2020
Rock stars and ninjas are overrated, be a plumber
Anyone remember back when companies would try to be “cool” by advertising that they were looking for a “ninja” or “rock-start” software engineer? Thankfully, those days really are just memories (hopefully the days of the “10X egnineer” will go extinct soon, too). These terms were stupid as job titles because […]
Don’t let anyone tell you who not to vote for
Election season is upon us yet again, which means it’s just about time for anyone who’s not registered as being affiliated with 1 of the 2 major parties to start hearing about how voting for anyone other than {speaker’s preferred major party candidate} is effectively voting for {candidate from the […]
So what’s everyone doing?
It’s real easy to get lost in the day-to-day of software development, especially if what you’re doing doesn’t fall under a heading that most people would call “game-changing.” As a result, we don’t really feel like talking about it. The downside to that is it means you’re not keeping your […]
Keeping your sanity while working from home with the rest of the family
I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff about how to best work from home (because apparently that’s not going to stop any time soon) floating around, either from people I know offline or being posted on social media. Given that most people were going into work every day, I’m guessing […]
Scrum’s not that bad
Generally speaking, when a software development organization says that they’re going or practicing agile development, they mean they’re following the Scrum methodology. Most jokes about doing software development have nothing to do idiosyncrasies of programming itself (Gary Bernhardt’s classic “Wat” presentation notwithstanding), but rather about dealing with Scrum. I get […]
Don’t try to out-think your users
Few things are as annoying as when you have a device that tries to be helpful and is completely, and utterly, wrong. Not only are you not gaining any convenience, because you still have to go back and fix it, but psychologically it feels worse because instead of making things […]
You need 3 administrative consoles
1 of the most iconic components to running software in production are consoles full of graphs and metrics about how that software’s performing. Generally, they’re called “dashboards,” but in my experience you want something that provides the ability to act on the data being shown on the console as opposed […]
Monoliths and service-oriented architectures
For some reason, I’ve been seeing a lot of people piping in and saying and/or predicting that monolithic software architecture is going to be making a comeback starting this year. It probably doesn’t help that once I started reading the first article about companies moving from services to monoliths, Google […]
It’s 11 PM, do you know if your external dependencies are healthy?
Whenever we write applications or services, we generally include some form of health check that we can easily (and regularly) poll to make sure everything is still up and running. That health check likely confirms that your code has access to everything it needs to function correctly. Well, generally that’s […]