The ups and downs of social voting

 General Commentary, Shenanigans  Comments Off on The ups and downs of social voting
Oct 232015
 

My friend Warren Myers had an interesting blog post on voting mechanics on various websites, along with “like” mechanic various social networks use (like buttons, +1 buttons, tweet favorites, etc.). I’ve made my feelings on things such as “like” buttons known, so I’m not going to go into those here. Warren raises some good points about the issues with voting on a lot of sites, but there are some places where I think works well that I think are worth noting, along with why they seem to work well. It’s important to note these reasons if you want to make sure your voting mechanic improves your site.

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 Posted by at 7:15 am
Jun 202015
 

If you’ve worked long enough, you’ve hit on something that involves multiple people. At that point, the common line is to “get all the stakeholders” together so everyone’s on the same page and actually working together. It’s a good philosophy, that works when you’re getting just the people involved in something together – and nobody else. The problem is that that’s rarely how these situations play out.  Continue reading »

 Posted by at 6:32 pm
Apr 142015
 

TechCrunch had 2 articles last month on “Secretly terrible engineers.” Reading the articles makes it sound like there’s a serious problem with how we interview software engineers. Personally, I just don’t see it. Software engineers are like every other profession, the people in it range from terrible to amazing, and the which engineer is which is hardly a secret. Likewise, having just gone through the interview process within the past year, I haven’t really encountered the issues Danny Crichton described. Granted, I wouldn’t interview anywhere near Silicon Valley, so my geography could be affecting what I observed, or I could just be absurdly lucky, but somehow I doubt it. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 11:29 am
Dec 312014
 

This post was originally going to be something marveling at how StackExchange only has 25 servers, but could probably run on 5 as well as wondering why nobody else seems to be able to do that, but the more I thought about that, the less convinced I was in that premise. With all the advances in cloud-provided servers, I’m less and less convinced about the need for people to run their own servers exclusively in a physical datacenter.

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 Posted by at 8:00 am

Why is everyone so down on long-term planning?

 General Commentary  Comments Off on Why is everyone so down on long-term planning?
Oct 162014
 

I was listening to an old Java Posse episode, when the topic of a 5-year plan came up, only to be immediately be met with disdain and contempt. In fact, nobody took the idea of long-term planning seriously. What I don’t understand is, why? What’s wrong with having a plan beyond the next iteration or 2? Personally, I think with agile development we’ve gotten so used to short development cycles and rapid release and pivots that we’ve completely lost any and all sense of the point of having a long-term plan. The fact is, if you don’t have any type of long-term plan, then your entire business strategy can be summed up as “we’re putting out this fire and hoping for the best.”

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 Posted by at 11:35 am

Move fast, break things, fix them (preferrably faster), and then blog about them

 General Commentary, Programming  Comments Off on Move fast, break things, fix them (preferrably faster), and then blog about them
Sep 302014
 

On August 1, 2014, Facebook went down. It came back after a few hours or less, but it was a visible reminder of their (now-former) motto of “Move fast and break things.” I made a joke about the issue, but I appreciate the philosophy, even if Facebook’s since tried to move away from it. I think it has a lot to do with their new model of “Move fast with stable infrastructure.” In fact, I think moving fast and breaking things is how they got their stable infrastructure. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 10:30 pm

Coursera’s introductory Scala course

 General Commentary, Scala, Shenanigans  Comments Off on Coursera’s introductory Scala course
Aug 262014
 

For the first half of the summer, I took the online Functional Programming Principles in Scala course on Coursera. I should probably point out that I didn’t take the $50 official I’d heard good things about the language, mostly from Dick Wall on Java Posse podcasts, and it seemed like a good way to try functional programming again after a brief, rather unpleasant, introduction to Lisp in college. Overall, my main goals were to a) re-acquaint myself with functional programming and b) get a basic, can-start-on-some-code-now understanding of Scala.

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 Posted by at 11:19 pm
Aug 092014
 

A couple of months ago, Mayday.us launched a big crowdfunding push to raise a crapton of money to form their own Super PAC, meant to fund and support candidates who would run on campaign platforms of reducing the influence of Super PAC money in elections. The overall goal, reduce corruption in federal politics, is a great agenda, but a SuperPAC built around limiting how much money people can spend in elections isn’t actually solving problems with American democracy. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 12:04 am