General Commentary – Page 9 – Software and Other Shenanigans

How do you solve a problem like sample data?

Dec 172015

It’s a tale as old as development – you make an application, and now you need to sell it. That means you need to have a demo, and demos require data in there. The dilemma is, what do you do to get that data? Do you have a demo app in a sandboxed environment, do you just add it to your regular production database, do you just take some screenshots of what the app looks like with data from a development environment, or do you do something else entirely? It seems like a stupid thing to worry about, until you’re actually trying to figure it out, then it becomes really important because whatever you decide to do about sample data, you’re going to have to live with forever.

A special thank-you to the people who make good software possible

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Nov 262015

Since ’tis the season of Thanksgiving, I wanted to offer up a special thank-you to the unsung heroes of any software development project. They’re vital to a good final product, yet most of the time nobody ever realizes the impact they had on getting your software where it is today. So, in the interest of spreading the thanks and love all around, thank you to all the people who aren’t “dev” or “ops” that make all this possible.

The ups and downs of social voting

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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.

You are not a stakeholder

General Commentary, Shenanigans 1 Response »

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 »

News flash, terrible programmers are hardly “secret”

General Commentary, Programming, Work 3 Responses »

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 »

Social networks should be like email

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Mar 252015

In 1 of my posts about social networks, I harped on the idea of the social network itself being an open platform, with apps running on that platform. What I should have pointed out is that email has been operating as apps on a platform, and they’re a perfect example of what I was talking about. Continue reading »

Why do people use physical servers again?

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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.

Why is everyone so down on long-term planning?

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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.”

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

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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 »

It’s secret sauce, not nuclear deployments

General Commentary, Shenanigans 2 Responses »

Sep 212014

A while back, my friend Warren answered somebody’s question on Quora about a name for their startup. Another college friend and I saw this and had some fun with it, but it does bring up an important point that needs to be pointed out – not everything you’re doing is some type of magical secret sauce.

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