Search Results: eng
the blind side of seniority
…accepted each other and capitalized on their individual strengths to build unbeatable teams. Because of that, I have always looked at building teams as finding the right mix of strengths and… [more]
What Makes a Senior Engineer Senior, and How Do You Build a Great Team?
…seniority ladder looks different. What separates a senior engineer from a junior one isn't a bigger pile of technē. The junior might well have fresher technē, more recent and better organized,… [more]
What Do Future Engineers Look Like?
This article was originally published on the Voze Engineering Blog and is republished here for posterity. What do you look for in an engineer when that engineer is not the one writing most of the… [more]
That’s what heroes do
…harder. Gail. Where is Gail? The question took all my strength to vocalize. Fear and adrenaline filled my system, as he looked away, his jaw tightening and relaxing systematically. She was gone. I… [more]
My Name is Ed
…heat wave that struck me rippled my clothes as the flames engulfed the fence and raced along the ground towards me. Great. If at first you don’t succeed… Footnotes I wrote this short story in college… [more]
Siblings
The most challenging belief I hold is: that you, And I, and the person slowing on the on ramp, And the child in the dump looking for food, And the woman sleeping under the bridge, And the teenager… [more]
Spotify Archivist
…was now pushing 400 lines of code, and files of that length and complexity are hard for me to reason about. In the end it was probably 70% generative ai, and 30% my own code. There are patterns not… [more]
the megaphone
…detail, and, by extension, nuance. One of the challenges of leadership is that we all carry around a megaphone. It's the only thing we speak through in our role, and it has its pros and cons. On… [more]
Team! A Module For Teams!
…on my hands... so I wrote a simple module for managing engineering team member information in automation projects. Basically I was working on some automation between Slack, OpsGenie, and JIRA to… [more]
The Hunt Begins
…strategies, and managed SOC efforts. I know how to help engineers, product folks, and UX designers collaborate effectively with each other. If you are looking for someone to help your team on a short… [more]
help the person next to you
…that the size of their biceps is an indication of their strength, the kids covered in tattoos announcing to the world how tough they are, the preening leaders who don’t want to get dirty, and the… [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
…something more fleshed out. Here we go! Some thoughts on engineering leadership a thread (and not a long one) -> — Daniel Sellers (@daniel_sellers) April 15, 2022 This is the intro... nothing… [more]
Last Lectures
…As part of that effort I’ve worked to build a culture in engineering where people coming and going is normal. We’ve started doing “Last Lectures” for all engineers who leave the company, and it’s been… [more]
What Makes a Team Lead Great?
…into the existing energy of the command, discover the strengths, and remove barriers to further progress.” The class supervisor looked at me as if I had three heads, but I knew he wasn’t going to fail… [more]
Lessons Learned From a Film Producer About Making Software
…from. I know Daren is planning on adding this type of engagement to his workshops, so if you are interested, reach out to him . Either way, get out there and learn from other people, and see what you… [more]
Today is going to be a great day, and other mindset shifts
…Tech debt as a regular part of the work cycle is a great engineering culture hack for lots of reasons. It allows for time to actually do it! It reduces bugs over time, it allows time to rethink and… [more]
Disjunctive Normal Form and other fine reads
…It’s syntax is friendly to no and slightly closer to English. I mean it has some odd logical elements like ‘unless’ that feel more awkward as an experienced programmer than as a new learner, but it is… [more]
Book Review-Aloha Rodeo-Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West
…one intended to intimately link the futures of Hawaii and England, beware of Brits bearing gifts it seems. It all starts to ramp up after King Kamehameha protects the surviving cattle from being… [more]
Book Review-Road to Valor
…with government officials faking achievements and engaging in scenes that feel eerily reminiscent of propaganda, such as riding shirtless on horses through the woods. The WWII period becomes a focal… [more]
Organizational Design Democracy And Ownership
…needed, that work extra when things go sideways. They are engaged. But there is another side to this type of employee engagement. If people with high ownership are not able to see their impact in the… [more]
Why weird team names make sense
…when they are highly objectively similar and when they engage in high levels of mimicry, meaning that both variables are likely to be important precursors to the feelings of trust that underpin… [more]
Software Engineer vs. Software Developer
What is the difference between a Software Engineer and a Software Developer? Or is there a difference? So I've been building websites and web apps since we used to be called Web Masters. Which is… [more]
Some thoughts inspired by "Toward peer review as a group engagement"
These are rough thoughts and should be taken as such. Think of them more as the interesting points that deserve thought in a context that the author of the paper (Andrea Bonaccorsi) was not… [more]
Lumio UtahJS Conf 2022
…remote teams and help drive excellence. Sr. Software Engineer We're looking for engineers who love building software, and work well in remote teams. Android Engineer If you're interested in… [more]
2021: Year in Review
…of that effort I’ve worked to build a culture in engineering where people coming and going is normal. We’ve started doing “Last Lectures” for all engineers who leave the company, and… [more]
Encourage teams to take risks
…broadly applicable, and I use them every day while leading engineering teams. The first lesson is that we should encourage people to take risks. Encourage them to go big, to step into something that… [more]
Antisemitism ends with us
…and of those who seek an easy answer to their life’s challenges. No, we have to take the hard road. First we must look inward, do any of those ideas resonate with us even the smallest amount? If we… [more]
2020: A year
…for a little over 4 years, had grown from a Sr. Engineer to a Team Lead and then an Engineering Manger running 4 teams on 2 continents. I'd helped launch a new product on a deadline, exercised my… [more]
Tech Things I read in 2018
…A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder Excellent Book on developing business models. Radical Candor by Kim Scott If you want to get better at being a team… [more]
design and the internet as ephemera
…now. And yet they are still there. Still present in search engines indices though they have slipped from the collective conscious. They are permenant ephemera, like a concert poster trapped on the… [more]
Critiques and Code Reviews
…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 years pursuing a degree in… [more]
Let's talk about Boot camps
…but will make long term progress difficult. To be a Senior Engineer you are going to need to be able to apply theory to understand many layers of abstraction. You will need to know what it means to… [more]
Language Drift and finding code beautiful
…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 "correct" english evolved in… [more]
Being Senior Part 1- the books and data
This is just a quick post to throw up the books I quoted from and a link to the data for anyone who attended my presentation at Utah JS Conference 2016 today. I am putting down my thoughts in a long… [more]
people and connections
…without judgement; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship." — Brené Brown courtesy of Swiss Miss [more]
Seeing and Speaking
…industry longer and come into contact with more and more engineers with deep computer science experience I have found that there are specific terms and words for concepts that I roughed out on my own… [more]
Seven Languages
…a simple web service that returns random words from an English dictionary Write a CLI tool that calculates parenthetical permutations aka Catalan numbers As I go along I am also going to be writing up… [more]
safe-shrinkwrap: for all your shrinkwrapping needs
One of the challenges that we have had in the recent past at work is with dependencies that don’t lock down their dependencies well. A lot of this probably rises from a misunderstanding of how ^… [more]
reducing noise
Noise is everywhere in our lives. From commercials, to billboards, to a new crying infant, it is literally everywhere. Some of it is good noise. Some of it is distracting us from the things we want to… [more]
2015: in review
…for the LDS Church and finished it as a Senior Front End Engineer for Instructure. During that time I re-wrote designfrontier on a new engine, using ansble for it’s data store and gave it an… [more]
Biology and CSS
…pregnancy, recessive and dominant traits were engaging in complex calculations to determine what physical attributes I would have. Blue eyes beat out my brother’s hazel eyes, and my… [more]
Design Tools are Broken
…to be able to swap languages in the same layout. The length of a phrase in Japanese is orders of magnitude shorter then in German. Swapping between those two and English is a missed step in most… [more]
On To New Horizons
…;-) 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 working with a bunch of people… [more]
Confidence Without Ego
…a team building a web app. It had some new technical challenges that we had never tackled, and we were just beginning to gel as a team. We were also all young, smart, talented, confident developers. I… [more]
Shadows raced toward us, spurred on by the…
Shadows raced toward us, spurred on by the Sun's dive behind the mountain. Night was coming, engulfing the world. It was time. [more]
Moving the World
…of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful… [more]
There is a Right Way
…be used to correctly solve a wide variety of design challenges. Because let’s face it, you can remove bolts with a cold chisel and a hammer, but a socket wrench just makes more sense. [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
…and I loved planes and knew immediately that a large passenger plane had been piloted into the towers. We recognized the tail paint. For me the scope of the disaster was so broad that it didn’t… [more]
Now Serving: Obsolescence
…I end up going home and sitting on wood spindle whittengale like chairs. So in a way you could argue that we’re building all these really kitsch stage sets that have absolutely nothing to do… [more]
Trust and the Box
…ago. One story stood out. It was the story of a young engineer who was sitting in mission control, monitoring the electrical systems on Apollo 12. We all know the story of Apollo 13, and this same… [more]