My friend has been managing for some time. He assigned an engineer to a project. He was very hands off, and the project took 3 months to complete. He claimed he would’ve been able to finish the feature in a day. I couldn’t resist teasing him about Captain Hindsight (was he really able to code […]
Managing with only your voice
Can you lead a team of 7 other people to show up at 4 AM and not pay them? I’ve only been able to do this in a video game called Guild Wars. Players make their own decision to wake up in the middle of the night to come play with me. I could call […]
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 […]
Code dilution
Expect to lose control over every feature you once wrote as an individual contributor. I remember my first feature as a newbie web developer, tracking user queries in the database. As I gained more experience, I created new systems and contributed to about 50% of the code base in about two years. I was responsible […]
Time cost of a simple feature
What appears easy to you not be so trivial for your engineering team. Everything looks doable until you’re the one responsible for implementing the idea. I have a system in production that generates a spreadsheet. A customer asked to merge data from multiple sources like Facebook and Twitter into the same workbook. Very reasonable request, […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- …
- 13
- Next Page »