Almost everyone close to me has a PhD. I never seriously considered one because I needed a break from school. So I got a job. Having more money didn’t hurt. I remember my coworkers telling me once I work in industry I’ll never return. They’re right. I never went back. One skill I developed during […]
Me friendly metrics
Often I see a widget displaying disk space: 47% remaining or 162379 GB of space left. That’s not very useful. This is what I need to know: [Disk Space] 14 days and 10 seconds left If this is shows up on a critical system, I’ll begin to panic. I only have two weeks to shift […]
Saved $1660 with a $40 experiment
We were trying to secure an important customer. They wanted an API to access our data. My team scrambled to assemble an endpoint. One of my engineers was very gung-ho about stress testing the API. He would throw everything he knew about breaking a system at it. And then we added SSL. We immediately saw […]
Flabby coding muscles
I can’t code all the time. I end up patching code here and there. What I’ve noticed is I can trace programs easily. Explaining why something broke is no problem. Carving up the code base is ok – I can see how things are put together. If I remove myself from the code base for […]
Don’t harp on code style when asked for help
An engineer pulls me over to look over his code. He can’t figure out why a method is executing twice, and I immediately blurt out, “Hm.. why are you checking your errors this way with if (err == nil) {} ?”He didn’t ask for my opinion on his code style. He was looking for someone […]
Evolving your tech stack
Everything changes rapidly. If you poke around Github, you will always find something new to tinker with thanks to open source. My team reflects that attitude too and if only we had more hours in a day to play with the latest hip libraries like React. I’ll admit the number of possibilities gets overwhelming. Today’s […]