In Appreciation of IKEA
We made a trip to the local IKEA this past weekend. The furniture store of college dorm rooms, IKEA was a staple of my 20s as I moved between apartments and condos, and evolved living...
Engineering
Review: Keep Calm and Code On
Keep Calm and Code On is a book that discusses what it takes to develop software professionally, not so much the technical aspects but lessons learned through experience. The subtitle is "A tactical guide...
When to Value Non-Technical Work
This presentation resonates: Being Glue It's a pretty long read, but the high-level gist is that software engineers are, more often than not, evaluated primarily on hard technical chops. You know: the typical stuff that you find in technical interviews, to sit down and produce code and architecture that addresses some notion of...
The Arrogance of Adolescence
I recently attended a conference for engineering leaders based in San Francisco. It was a 2-day affair, and along with the usual talks and networking, the organizers smartly set up their venue for roundtables, 1:1s, and other peer-to-peer conversations that served as a direct contrast to the virtual Zoom conferences these past few years....
When to Code Creatively
This article caught my attention: Being "rockstars": when software was a talents/creatives industry š The post meanders quite a bit, but the central theme is that the author laments the loss of creativity in software development. Their solution, then, is to compare the tools and processes and workflows of creative professionalsāmusicians, actors,...
The Framework Engineer
I've written about promotions before, particularly in contrasting the differences between prescriptive and descriptive promotions and generally favoring the latter. In quick summary, the former rewards excellence with current responsibilities by showing confidence in a broader assignment, while the latter is a lagging acknowledgment of solid execution at the next level. It'...