Search Results: about
the blind side of seniority
…leave that for another day. Instead, let's talk about how each of us has weaknesses that leave us with unique blind sides that we are both aware of, and oblivious to. A while back, I was talking… [more]
What Makes a Senior Engineer Senior, and How Do You Build a Great Team?
…State , and toward the end of it he goes on a long tangent about agriculture. Specifically about the high modernist urge to rationalize farming completely, and squeeze the maximum possible yield out… [more]
What Do Future Engineers Look Like?
…ladder of abstraction as engineers, being able to think about systems as a whole becomes more important. It is also critical that engineers be able to reason through the complex interactions both… [more]
That’s what heroes do
…The driver tried to strike up conversation, something about the weather or baseball or something equally generic. I ignored him. I didn’t care. When the car pulled up to the house it was too much. He… [more]
My Name is Ed
…Not exactly the brightest thing to do. It worked great for about the first four or five times, just long enough for me to get overly confident in my aim, and then well… I missed and scraped the edge… [more]
lab
…based sentiment analysis for months and years. Read More About it Memorize a little app for learning quotes, scriptures, and poems by heart, practicing a paragraph at a time. It installs to your… [more]
Spotify Archivist
…destructive things you aren't sure of). Let's talk about how it went and what I wound up with. First... the initial prompt for Claude.ai: write a shell node script that reads all of my… [more]
the megaphone
…it’s been a while, check the footnotes for examples. Think about that sound. What does it evoke? For me, it evokes lo-fi urgency: rebellion, idealism, immediacy. It doesn’t evoke clarity or… [more]
The Hunt Begins
…Let's talk! Other things If you are curious about how I think about engineering, organizations, and more here are some things I have written that might shed some light on it: Some Thoughts on… [more]
help the person next to you
…strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others, to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose. — Lt. Cmdr. Greitens talking about the qualities of the US Navy SEALs [more]
Meet with me!
Come meet with me about software engineering things, career things, business things, or bike things. If the calendar below doesn't work, it doesn't seem to love mobile devices, go here instead [more]
Some Thoughts on Engineering Leaderhip
…to quote all the tweets here and then try to explain more about the topics they are touching on. Try to take it a little bit out of stream of conscious and into something more fleshed out. Here we go!… [more]
Last Lectures
…is pretty simple, each person is given an hour to talk about whatever they want to. That’s it. Managers across the company are invited, and all of engineering. We record it and send it around to… [more]
Book Review-How to Survive in a Science Fictional Universe
…enjoy this book. If not, then, maybe not. I could say more about how I thought it was going to be a fun, sci-fi, time travel, story, and then it is. But it very quickly turns into a cerebral… [more]
Book Review-Stranger in a strange land
…level of exposition takes some really interesting ideas, about language, and how we observe the world, what it means to be human, and the legal conflict of the future, and waters them down with… [more]
What Makes a Team Lead Great?
…top down teams every time. Card might disagree with me about this, but you have Ender using independently managed small teams, to defeat traditional military hierarchy in Battle School, and then going… [more]
About A Bike Race
…Your rival accelerates They stretch away like elastic about to break You snap them back You breathe. Three things exist The line Your bike Your rival. You feel Hope Rage Exhaustion You forget to… [more]
Lessons Learned From a Film Producer About Making Software
…Daren Smith to see if he would be willing to come and talk about the process of producing films and TV. Having read his article about producing profitable films , I thought there were some strong… [more]
Today is going to be a great day, and other mindset shifts
…in the shop has made for lots of craziness. But let’s talk about some mindset shifts for the new year! The first article in the category for the week is Practice the Maui Habit to Build a Success… [more]
Cultural Homogeneity
I've been thinking about France and French culture, and why it is that a country that only recently in the broad scheme of things adopted more equal policies around gender, is also a nation where… [more]
Disjunctive Normal Form and other fine reads
…But it does highlight one of the things I find fascinating about the Ruby community. First, Ruby is probably one of the best first languages out there. It’s syntax is friendly to no and slightly… [more]
Book Review-A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller
…in the idea that if you want someone to be a cared about in a story they need to show that they can do good (save the cat) quickly. With that done, you can have them go through a complex story arc,… [more]
Book Review-Getting to Yes
…negotiating but that is what this book of is all about. A good read even if some of the examples haven’t aged incredibly well. [more]
Book Review-Aloha Rodeo-Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West
…who worked the nascent cattle ranches of Hawaii. I heard about this book on NPR a few years back when it came out and finally got my ears on it this year. It was worth the wait. As a history book,… [more]
Book Review-The Ocean at the End of the Lane
…It’s a very enjoyable book, that makes you think hard about life as you roll along. Make sure as you read it that you remember, “You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.” [more]
Organizational Design Democracy And Ownership
…drop into place. This week I had one of those. And it was about why people leave companies, and how to help them stick around longer. As an added bonus it is probably applicable to western democracies… [more]
Human Communications Are Hard
…observed to [reduce the quality of the conversation]… about one mean opinion score point… without additional echo." Just more than a half a second of additional delay lowers your opinion of the… [more]
Why weird team names make sense
…naming things is hard. Very hard. Second, let's think about what a name is, and why it might make sense to have names that don't make sense. The initial inclination would be to name teams… [more]
Some thoughts inspired by "Toward peer review as a group engagement"
…is a good place to start this: this paper was written about academic peer review and not about code review. I personally find these to be close cousins to each other but they represent different… [more]
Lumio UtahJS Conf 2022
…expanding team. Check out the jobs, and more information about our team below! Open Jobs Team Lead We're looking for people centered leaders who build strong remote teams and help drive… [more]
2021: Year in Review
…side before but this was new. And I am continuing to learn about it! Now that we’ve been acquired I am working to stabilize and grow the team and get them on solid footing inside a new, much… [more]
Encourage teams to take risks
…she could. Now, before you start thinking this is all about me, let me pull a couple of important leadership lessons from this conversation, because they are broadly applicable, and I use them every… [more]
Antisemitism ends with us
…Holocaust Museum . They work tirelessly to educate people about the holocaust, and extremism. If you’re unfamiliar with their work, here are a few articles to get you started. We cannot allow these… [more]
2020: A year
…feel free to jump to them. For now let's talk about other things that happened this year. Early in the year we welcomed a son to our family! Little did we know that the last “normal” thing… [more]
A Simple QR Code Based System for Organizing Your Boxes
…tempted to write my own app… but then I started thinking about how I could create a system without doing any programming and in a few minutes. Time being precious with a newborn in the house. I knew… [more]
Tech Things I read in 2018
…time. I’ll also toss in a some notes or thoughts about a book where it seems reasonable. Things Worth Reading First and foremost I joined the Association for Computing Machinery this year on the… [more]
Neptune (Gremlin) Local Dev Setup
…graph databases right now, for a fun project I may write about later. When I first started out I was using Neo4j, which has an excellent local development story, a lovely web based UI for visualizing… [more]
Cresting the ridge revealed the barren miles that…
…on forever. That was good though. I had things to think about. Things that I didn't want interrupted by idle conversation. I tapped my horse's flanks and it headed toward the horizon. [more]
There are two kinds of settlers on the…
…refer to creekside settlers as "too lazy to care about security". The Schmidts refer to the Waltons as "paranoid". [more]
Direct Feedback
…was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really… [more]
On Bikesheds
…it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is… [more]
Vetting Information you read on the internet
…red flag that you need. One last thing: This isn’t about liberal or conservative. This is about recognizing truth wherever it is. See an article you don’t trust? Expose it. See an article… [more]
design and the internet as ephemera
…around for months after the concert is over. In thinking about this I realized that the most important thing on any blog is the most recent article. That no one really dives into the archives unless… [more]
The right Tools for the right job
…is part of why I like doing them. It forces me to think about computational complexity. I just wish I had picked up enough algorithms knowledge already to be able to fly through some of these.… [more]
Office Hours
…hours? So far I’ve done 2 office hour meetings. We talked about career stuff. We talked about interviews and how to handle them better. We talked about where they wanted to be in their careers. We… [more]
Jumping on the AMA bandwagon
…discoverable. That is on purpose. I really should write about the design experiment that this site is. Maybe soon. Or someone could ask in the AMA :-) [more]
First Impressions: Redux/Flow
…Just a thought. This also means that we could be about to swing back hard towards vue.js which is more like Angular 1 in its developer ergonomics. I hope not... and I also hope that I am proven wrong… [more]
So I got Scammed on Amazon
…me. It was a clever one and not one I have seen written about so I am writing about it. The Setup I was in the market for a truing stand for building wheels and truing them for my bicycles. Because… [more]
monument
…the request. We’ll get more into this in a follow on post about using events in monument to decouple your application. Developer Experience One of the things that Ruby on Rails gets very right and… [more]
Critiques and Code Reviews
…(So long ago!). Still seems relevant. Let’s talk about critiques, or as engineers call them code reviews. I am going to start with a major caveat: I do not have a design degree. I spent two… [more]
So you Studied History and You're a Conservative... I am Sorry.
…You see, studying history means that you learned a lot about things like evaluating the quality of source material, tracking down data to confirm hypothesis, using scientific research approaches on… [more]
Let's talk about Boot camps
…a while ago has stalled. So instead I am going to write about small chunks of it. This is the first. The most surprising finding of the survey was the dramatic increase in the number of Junior… [more]
Language Drift and finding code beautiful
…on my way into work in which John McWhorter was talking about the evolution of the english language over time. One of the things that was really interesting was his discussion about how the idea of… [more]
Death to Jquery
…for the duration of the project. Whatever you think about jQuery the slides are at least interesting... and making the randomly generated backgrounds was really fun. Might have to write about that… [more]
Being Senior Part 1- the books and data
…data from the survey. The long form will talk more about the methods I used to evaluate the information and what all the colors, and numbers in there mean. For now... enjoy. The books that I… [more]
Seeing and Speaking
…their replacement with shelves. When we started talking about where to put them and how many shelves to make we just talked about storage and keeping the top of the kitchen feeling "light". We… [more]
Getting Lost and Happiness
…really bring them a lot of enjoyment. In my book I talk about when we got my son a little mechanical car when he was about 3 years old, because he saw a neighbor get that car. He was into the car for… [more]
Io: the language, not the moon
…also prototypal. Before we jump into the things I learned about the language that I thought were interesting let’s jump into the bad stuff. The things that were a pain and the things that made… [more]
mourning
…families and friends. I can’t help but also think about the wounded, both mentally and physically. My thoughts are with you and my prayers as well. I am also deeply disappointed in our response… [more]
estimations and theory building
…another. All of which is fascinating! But this article is about how all of that plays into the difficulty of estimating projects. I was talking the other day with a co-worker about how we really… [more]
reducing noise
…for a period of time is one of the best things about OS X. I often flip the switch when I need to really focus on some code and it helps. I can catch up on any fires that are cropping up after I get… [more]
:hover should be dead
…with active though. Frustrating Interactions Just think about nested hover state menus. There is a reason desktop applications require you to click on at least that first level of menus. Because… [more]
2015: in review
…npm. It’s been fun to develop and more fun to talk about with people. I’ve learned a lot doing it. If you are about to build a new node project you should definitely take a look at it.… [more]
Learning the Trade
…YUI Books: JavaScript the Good Parts . Say what you will about Crockford this is still the foundational work for javascript development. Eloquent Javascript has some great sections in it. Particularly… [more]
Details. Details. Details.
…forms of design have this in common. Small details tell us about the quality of the things we interact with. From the sound of the car door you close, to the weight of your phone in your hand. We pick… [more]
Biology and CSS
…I have blue eyes and olive skin. Now that you know more about my physical appearance than you wanted to let’s get down to brass tacks. The inheritance model that resulted in me having these… [more]
Thoughts on Components and stuff
…all this is understanding that most of the things you know about creating applications is wrong. Here comes heavy hitter #1: Routes don’t matter to your components. Seriously they don’t… [more]
Design Tools are Broken
…them be better designers. But this isn't an article about that. This is an article about how badly our design tools are failing us in user experience [UX]. Because they are, and it is hurting the… [more]
On To New Horizons
…cyclist is kind of a big plus ;-) Mostly I’m excited about tackling some new challenges, building a product again, after almost two years of writing library code and tooling for developers, and… [more]
The Problem of Over Communication
…and immediately write it off as just another rant, think about it. How often do you read internal emails? How about newsletters? How often do you just click delete them? Are there certain people who… [more]
Modules not Globals
…into its own file? There are lots of things we could talk about with componentized architecture. But there is a single thing that should be a massive flashing sign that you need a module. That thing… [more]
REST vs. RPC and a mention of HATEOS
…REST APIs describe the data itself. They aren’t about you can do X with the data. If you want to do X to the data then you do X and then send it to the API for persistence. REST is a persistence… [more]
Confidence Without Ego
…not to place himself in competition with others. Who goes about his business as directed, without thinking less of anyone. I thought in some ways that humility was the opposite of confidence. I… [more]
Line-Height... lineheight... line-height
…a result of this bug. I promise. We’re pretty sure about that. It is not a virus. There are many viruses on the internet but this is not one of them. It does not seem capable of carrying… [more]
Approaching CSS the OO Way
…I wonder if this is actually how our industry thinks about CSS. Sometimes I am pretty sure it is, and that makes me cringe. Not inside, but physically cringe. I am doing it right now... Because it… [more]
Toward a More Responsive Future
…third party service then you need to think long and hard about #1. So security, whenever you rely on an outside service to manage any aspect of your site you are opening yourself up to the possibility… [more]
There is a Right Way
…experience create a mancala board ready to be finished in about 15 minutes. If you don’t do the setup work and research, at the beginning you will do it many times over during the project. The… [more]
Don't Call Me. I'll Call You. Single Request Responsive Images
We’ve been talking about responsive design around the office a lot lately. It’s kind of a big deal these days. The holy grail seems to be responsive images, or a system that allows you to… [more]
11
…anniversary of September 11th I thought I would reminisce about my memories from that day, far from New York City. I am working to compile my families’ stories and may expand beyond them to… [more]
Setting up Speed: Cherokee, Railo and CouchDB on AWS
…update the server instance. When I wrote this there were about 121 MB worth of updates as soon as I spun up the instance. Create a directory to store the railo installer, I went with railoInstaller.… [more]
Setting up Speed: Cherokee, Railo and CouchDB on AWS
…update the server instance. When I wrote this there were about 121 MB worth of updates as soon as I spun up the instance. Create a directory to store the railo installer, I went with railoInstaller.… [more]
Current Projects Update
…develop it as a mobile app in the future. I recently wrote about it but I might as well mention it again.Tokenizer is my first open source project, a form token management system designed to make… [more]
Now Serving: Obsolescence
…(clip) While I often disagree with Karim he is right about some of what he says. We do revisit archetypes, even when the technology we have would allow us to abandon them completely. Karim thinks… [more]
Trust and the Box
…Apollo days I was amazed as he unfolded story after story about the people who had worked in these seats decades ago. One story stood out. It was the story of a young engineer who was sitting in… [more]
A Tale of Two Cookies: Securing ColdFusion Session Cookies
…make it impossible to hijack the session? No. Security is about making it more difficult to gain access. There is always a way to compromise a system, it is just a factor of time and computing power.… [more]
Relaunch of DesignFrontier
So here it is! After having worked for many hours, it's official. The redesign process has been exciting. Creating new features in new ways has been a blast. Is it done? Far from it. I am still… [more]