Revisiting the Tech Lead/Manager Role
A couple years back, when I was first getting into management and learning from some of the best managers I’ve ever had the privilege of working with, I concluded that the Tech Lead/Manager...
Engineering
No Shortcuts to Software Development Experience
Software startups, once their engineering organizations reach a certain size, put together a career ladder for their engineers. It usually comes at a point where there’s enough diversity in abilities that a distinction is...
Data Sync Not Invented Here
You’d think that data syncing is a solved problem for applications. Dropbox has been around for close to 10 years , and they came up with a product model — a local folder whose files (usually)...
Modular Agile Development
Are there any real alternatives to agile development in commercial software? There’s waterfall development, which overemphasizes software design in trading off the speed of iteration. It may be appropriate in specific, limited domains where...
The Missing Gap Between College and Self-Taught Programming
Even when I was in school—over a decade ago—there was this tension in the Computer Science department between academia and industry. Everybody knew from the dotcom days that the Computer Science major (along with EECS, and even Applied Mathematics and Cognitive Science) was to software engineering as pre-med was to medicine: software companies...
The Overwhelming List Argument
I call it the overwhelming list argument™. It’s a rhetorical device that I see used to try to present something as more grandiose and complicated than it actually is. The technique is simply list...