Reading this article about how crappy code is in "the real world", you would think that all software is written by developers either too dumb, or too smart – which is just a conceited way of saying they're too dumb to realize their deficiencies – to do their jobs. Of course, there are...
I read this pretty interesting article on the engineering of pedals and hinges, the life expectancy of components and the rigorous testing for reliability in mechanical parts. Engineering is ultimately about tradeoffs, and this was a classic example of balancing cost and weight against stability and longevity. It made me think about how developers try...
It's cool to do a technology startup. Conventional wisdom has been that employees from big companies get tired of the lack of impact, the bureaucracy and the middle management, and the ones who have smarts and ambition will build their own visions. Since starting a company is so damned hard, the generally accepted...
A colleague pointed me to an interesting article by a senior Yahoo front-end engineer. It goes through what companies need to do to hire "great FE engineers", that A developers are attracted by other A players but more importantly, companies need to foster an environment friendly to front-end web processes, from an attention...
Late last year, I finally made the effort to learn that other text editor, vim. I knew the basics of emacs from school, and I had always relied on simple, graphical text editors like Textmate and domain-specific IDEs along the lines of Visual Studio and RubyMine. At Square, however, my team has made vim the...
Lately, I've been reflecting on my software engineering career as a software engineer. I've had the privilege of working with some truly exceptional developers, and while most of them weren't great teachers[1], they nonetheless impart lessons through action and behavior. Engineering talent is hard to find, and – to...
