Search Results: work
the blind side of seniority
…software engineer. He has architected large systems, worked on large systems, and worked on small ones. We got onto how having a lot of experience is both a blessing and a curse to software engineers,… [more]
a great work
A great work lies already to the hand of this generation; it should count itself happy, indeed, that to it is given the privilege of doing such a work. – Theodore Roosevelt (Vice Presidential… [more]
What Makes a Senior Engineer Senior, and How Do You Build a Great Team?
…knowledge. What people know who have actually done this work, in this specific place, for a long time. As opposed to technē , the systematic and theoretical knowledge that can be written down, taught… [more]
What Do Future Engineers Look Like?
…now. The New Rubric System Thinking Understands how their work fits into the bigger picture across teams, codebases, and the product. Can zoom from the 1000-mile view down to a single block of code.… [more]
That’s what heroes do
…and those were slipping quickly into death. They had worked for hours moving people in packed ambulances to hospitals where surgeons worked feverishly to save lives. Much of it had been in vain. The… [more]
My Name is Ed
…not the point, this whole fence-building thing just isn’t working for me. My tool belt keeps jabbing me in the stomach, my hat was either too tight or the wind blows it off. I think you get the point.… [more]
Safe Homes
…judged them Unworthy of life, and care, Coming here to work, In inhumane conditions, Lungs, clogged by coal and cotton, Still better then the gnawing death, left behind. Here to pray as they wished… [more]
lab
…at a time. It installs to your phone's home screen and works offline. Win the West an online bluffing card game for 2 to 6 outlaws. Lie, manipulate, and bribe your way to victory. [more]
Spotify Archivist
…make it the default behavior. This resulted in a mostly workable version. With a few more prompts and revisions it produced a workable tool, with env var handling, a mostly good readme, and some code… [more]
the megaphone
…is more important than what I need my team to work on right now!" But how sure are you? Is it worth them stopping whatever they’re doing now, wherever it is in the process? Could it wait a few… [more]
Team! A Module For Teams!
…member information in automation projects. Basically I was working on some automation between Slack, OpsGenie, and JIRA to simplify the on call and support process. What I realized was that the more… [more]
The Hunt Begins
…at (Lumio) has ended in bankruptcy which puts me out of work. I had a fantastic team, and was with them to the end. It was a wild ride and now it's time to find the next adventure. Why should you… [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
…They owe them clear role definitions so they know what to work on, and what to worry about. Sidebar: if you are reading this as a leader of leaders... open up your linkedin. Find mentors for your team… [more]
Last Lectures
…end review for 2021 I wrote, 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… [more]
Book Review-Stranger in a strange land
…Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein As someone working in computers the slang term grok is pretty synonymous with understanding. It turns out that it originates here in Heinlein’s Martian… [more]
What Makes a Team Lead Great?
…the feature projects Can speak to the projects the team is working on, both technically and in terms of progress Is not taking blocking tasks (unless carefully considering trade offs) Team receives… [more]
Lessons Learned From a Film Producer About Making Software
…so I wanted to bring someone to speak to us who worked outside of technology and that I thought we could learn important ideas from to help us focus in on the work of the rest of the day. So I reached… [more]
The infinite power of people
…Brené’s writing and research. It could be because she works at my alma mater (Go Coogs!), it could be that her Texan voice bypasses my defenses and allows me to relate quickly, through shared… [more]
Today is going to be a great day, and other mindset shifts
…just always so good! My notes ). It presents the idea of working from more positive reference points in dealing with tech debt and focusing in on making it part of your regular cycle. Tech debt as a… [more]
Cultural Homogeneity
…their humanity. Discount their worth. And let's work to remove those. Innovation often happens through cross pollination of ideas across disciplines. Social innovation is likely similar. And just… [more]
Book Review-The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson
…to be human. Boom, yeah that’s a big premise. But as Shia works out how to counterfeit a human soul her exploration of the complex origins of that individuals personality is both beautiful and… [more]
Book Review-Getting to Yes
…motivations and interests of everyone at the table before working towards agreement. Humanizing the person you are negotiating with and clearly stating desired outcomes seem like obvious things but… [more]
Book Review-Aloha Rodeo-Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West
…fight the indigenous population, and where the cattle they work have a nasty habit of killing people. All of which sounds like an alternate history work of fiction, but is in fact the story of the… [more]
Book Review-The Ocean at the End of the Lane
…Gaimon I have a mixed experience with Neil Gaiman's work. Not because he isn’t a brilliant story teller, because he is. It’s more a content thing for me. Not all of his writing that I have read… [more]
Book Review-Road to Valor
…point, revealing Bartali's involvement in aiding a network that smuggled Jews out of Italy. His "training" rides transform into covert missions to transport forged documents, all hidden… [more]
Organizational Design Democracy And Ownership
…are the ones that keep things going, that tackle the hard work needed, that work extra when things go sideways. They are engaged. But there is another side to this type of employee engagement. If… [more]
Human Communications Are Hard
…the far-end." The implications of this for a remote work force are dramatic. Possibly more dramatic for the interview process. The paper mentions elsewhere that an increase in delay of 600 ms… [more]
Why weird team names make sense
…and Banpo. Named for bridges in different cities, while we worked on a product named Bridge. A lot of people look at those names and think, why name teams after bridges? Why name them at all? And if… [more]
Some thoughts inspired by "Toward peer review as a group engagement"
…allocate a fixed proportion of their time to referee work, it is likely that they will accept submissions in a hierarchical order, first from journals of higher reputation." really made me pause.… [more]
Lumio UtahJS Conf 2022
…looking for engineers who love building software, and work well in remote teams. Android Engineer If you're interested in building things in Kotlin for native android, this is the role for you.… [more]
2021: Year in Review
…has been a real learning journey for me. On the business/work side of things I helped prep for an acquisition and participated in the due diligence for the acquisition from the acquired… [more]
Encourage teams to take risks
…they are tackling. Because now our job as leaders is to work as hard as we can to ensure they have what they need to be successful. My mother-in-law is an artist, and very very detailed in the way she… [more]
Antisemitism ends with us
…stand against them vocally? If not the latter then we have work to do. With that work done we need to look outward. We need to then decry the use of division by reaching out to those who we would be… [more]
2020: A year
…birth. It was great, to be able to take some time out from work and help around the house. It also gave me some time to think about where I was, and where I wanted to be. I had been at Instructure for… [more]
A Simple QR Code Based System for Organizing Your Boxes
…use Google docs for all sorts of things, maybe they would work here. Then a little more experimenting with the mobile apps, and the various offerings and I realized that Google Slides was the best… [more]
Tech Things I read in 2018
…for Computing Machinery this year on the suggestion of a coworker. They have an incredible collection of papers that are worth the price of admissions. Plus they have a reasonable code of ethics that… [more]
Neptune (Gremlin) Local Dev Setup
…when you are trying to figure out how the query language works to be able to see if your query returns nothing because there is nothing, or if you’ve written it wrong. In looking for what to use I… [more]
On Bikesheds
The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one… [more]
Making the world more beautiful
…of use represented the love placed on an object. That a work bench and a table with dings in it represent the highest form of praise for design? Of course this all falls apart if experiencing Japanese… [more]
Vetting Information you read on the internet
…because of the certain set of skills I have been honing at work for the last decade I have some quick ways of vetting websites for content accuracy that the average non-nerd (read cool person)… [more]
design and the internet as ephemera
…they need to. There are a few things I am still trying to work out with this approach. The chief being that google doesn’t seem to handle the 302 redirect to the permanent URL for the current… [more]
The right Tools for the right job
…is fun to have quick computationally intense problems to work every once in a while. 5. I really like Rust’s syntax It’s really nice. Fighting the compiler on types is something I am not… [more]
First Impressions: Redux/Flow
…redux right now for a new project I just switched to at work. First, I love the theoretical idea of redux. It’s great and founded on excellent CS principles. Second, I am not a fan of types in… [more]
So I got Scammed on Amazon
…random address... doesn’t really matter for this to work. Once they generate the tracking number and it ships Amazon releases the funds to them so they got their money. And I got the impression… [more]
monument
Over the past several years I’ve been working on a new application framework for nodejs. Monument is currently on it’s second major release. What is Monument Monument is focused on three things:… [more]
Critiques and Code Reviews
…development as designers, coders, and the quality of our work. When I was studying Industrial Design we had weekly formal critiques. The kind where you pin your work on the wall explain it quickly and… [more]
Let's talk about Boot camps
…forceful transformation. Also, films like The Social Network have made developing web apps cool. Creating a tech startup has become the chosen path of upward mobility. Add that to a world where the… [more]
ambition. life's work.
…that ambition is the thing that guides us to our life’s work is interesting. I think it is possibly more complicated then that. That our ambition highlights the things that interest us and that those… [more]
Language Drift and finding code beautiful
…in the Eternal War of the Semicolon. As I was driving into work this morning I was listening to this interview on my way into work in which John McWhorter was talking about the evolution of the… [more]
Being Senior Part 1- the books and data
…which are mostly about the development of craft and work ethic, are: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education… [more]
ambition. life's work.
…that ambition is the thing that guides us to our life’s work is interesting. I think it is possibly more complicated then that. That our ambition highlights the things that interest us and that those… [more]
begin it
…we need is a strong drink to gulp down fast, so set to work and brew it! What’s left undone today, is still not done tomorrow; to every day there is a use and purpose; let Resoluteness promptly seize… [more]
Seeing and Speaking
…for. This can be frustrating for us designers when we work for a customer with a bad eye and strong opinions. But this is no justification for designer arrogance or eye-rolling. Part of our job is to… [more]
Io: the language, not the moon
…You need Docker A whole lot of the internals don’t work on OS X currently. It seems mostly tied to the way that the installer and OS X manage libevent, but I didn’t really dive deep enough… [more]
Seven Languages
A few weeks ago we started a book club at work and we are running through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks (but we are doing it in 14 weeks instead). So far the book is fantastic but I want to get even… [more]
safe-shrinkwrap: for all your shrinkwrapping needs
…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]
estimations and theory building
…is closer to building theories of how the world works then it is to manufacture. This has really interesting ramifications. The reason it came up has more to do with the gradual decline that code… [more]
reducing noise
…to reduce the number of interruptions in my life and work and I thought I would share a few of them here for posterity. Goodbye Facebook Just kidding. I am not leaving Facebook. It solves an important… [more]
2015: in review
…true this year around here in 2015. I started the year working as a Front End Stack team (core team) member for the LDS Church and finished it as a Senior Front End Engineer for Instructure. During… [more]
Learning the Trade
…you will about Crockford this is still the foundational work for javascript development. Eloquent Javascript has some great sections in it. Particularly as a primer on functional programming in js.… [more]
Thoughts on Components and stuff
…at a conference (NG-conf) and some presenters demoed the work they had done to create an Angular directive that included all the controls for a quadcopter. Yep. (Side note... components and the… [more]
On To New Horizons
…For the last three and a half years I’ve been working for the LDS Church as a front end developer, first on education projects then on the core stack team. I’ve learned an immense amount,… [more]
The Problem of Over Communication
…care about and connect with. That is the moment when fireworks happen, when people start to care about what you are saying. When people want to get involved. When they connect with your message and go… [more]
Confidence Without Ego
…happen though. Think Michael Jordan. A while ago I was working on 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… [more]
The silver pipe slipped over my shoulder from…
The silver pipe slipped over my shoulder from an unseen worker. A flash and a sneeze jumped from it's mouth. Ahead a man fell hard. [more]
Audio and Old Androids
I just got done working on a project that involved the use of the audio tag (with flash fallback for IE) and thought I would share a couple of the issues that we ran into in working on it, and how… [more]
Approaching CSS the OO Way
…and it takes thinking about things from the framework of classical Computer Science. CSS is a beautiful thing when well written. It is flexible, powerful and fun to work with. So stop slapping your… [more]
Toward a More Responsive Future
…to use something like respond.js to make media queries work in Internet Explorer, but there are ways around that, depending on how you structure your media queries. Another drawback is that each image… [more]
Moving the World
…been chosen, and now it is requisite that we all get to work. Our nation faces some of the most challenging problems in it's history, and we all need to get to work on solving them. The only way we… [more]
There is a Right Way
I grew up working with power tools. I think I was 9 the first time I used a router. As a family we were making mancala boards for christmas presents for family and friends. The noise was intense, the… [more]
Short Circuit and the Javascript IF Statement
…are other short forms of that if statement that would work. But, the short circuited form is clever, and interesting. It really shows off one of the interesting aspects of the language that you… [more]
Don't Call Me. I'll Call You. Single Request Responsive Images
…browsers. By images I am talking about image tags, frameworks like 320 and up and media queries can take care of the layout images in css. One of the best systems out there is by the Filament group,… [more]
11
…my memories from that day, far from New York City. I am working to compile my families’ stories and may expand beyond them to collect the stories of others who were far away from ground zero on… [more]
Setting up Speed: Cherokee, Railo and CouchDB on AWS
I am working on a little side project (ansble.com) which is going to require scalability, and a layered architecture that I just couldn't reasonably build in a physical environment. So I started… [more]
Setting up Speed: Cherokee, Railo and CouchDB on AWS
I am working on a little side project (ansble.com) which is going to require scalability, and a layered architecture that I just couldn't reasonably build in a physical environment. So I started… [more]
Current Projects Update
…a coin to sets of random numbers. More features are in the works though this particular project is on hold at the moment. The dice (which are completely created with CSS3 gradients) came in handy the… [more]
Now Serving: Obsolescence
…factors such as technological advances, available skilled workers, and foreign government policy, also played roles.” (source) With an increasing number of inexpensive labor hours, friendly… [more]
Trust and the Box
…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 mission control, monitoring… [more]
A Tale of Two Cookies: Securing ColdFusion Session Cookies
Recently at work we went through a security review. It was a great learning experience to have outside contractors try and break into the web application. Found several things that I didn't expect and… [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]