Cath writes some very salient points about growing into leadership that on the one hand should be more widespread, but on the other hand, everybody will likely have to find out for themselves.
Any programming language once it gets big enough will face pressure to turn into Java. PHP succumbed to it, let’s see where Go goes. Try isn’t that big of an issue but it is a path that eventually may lead to… generics and other stuff.
Lovely to see the Twisted community take the lead in moving Python forward and I fully support this idea of giving the standard library the Konmari treatment.
Amazon RedShift is a hosted version of ParAccel. More recently, a plethora of open source SQL-on-Hadoop projects have emerged; they are young but aiming to compete with commercial data warehouse systems. These include Apache Hive, Spark SQL, Cloudera Impala, Facebook Presto, Apache Tajo, and Apache Drill [52, 53].
A frankly amazing piece by Monica Lent using her experience to debunk seven commonly held truths about programming with verve. Programming consists of folklore and beliefs are often just beliefs. That indeed makes most learning in this field a question of unlearning.
A nicely put explanation for why I too pick my environments to be maximally productive with minimal configuration. In many cases, I just make do to the disgust of those who’ve learned all the shortcuts and applied all the customizations, but to them I’d say: marginal returns and opportunity cost.
I’d dare say that with the waning of the iPhone as a platform (both for development and for business), Apple’s closed plays will be increasingly lackluster. I’ve been rooting for Swift but it’s a horse running in the wrong race.
Gitlab’s CEO Shadow Program is a testament to their deep and deliberate thinking about organizational development. I’m curious whether more companies do this.
I am hard out at three 2/3 days a week to pick up my children and stayed at home last Friday to take care of a sick kid, so I am doing my best to parent very much out in the open in my workplace. It helps that my grandboss is also very explicit about this but I still find it difficult.
“Changes to one team’s service may be implemented by another team who needs the enhanced capability by what is called an Away Team. This team works on the Home Team’s code to add what it needs according to established engineering standards and then leaves that code in good order to be maintained by the Home Team who owns the service, with help when needed.”
Many years ago I suggested building in async facilities into Django. I got ridiculed for that both for technical feasibility (rightly) and necessity (short-sightedly). Now finally we have a proposal to build those features into the framework that demonstrates the same need and that can be implemented.
This article about forecasting dovetails nicely with the book about measuring risk that I just read. It makes the case for foxlike thinking, something of which I don’t need to be persuaded.
A book and an overview of how career opportunities are closed off to those without the right background and how to be cognizant of this and correct for it.
Usually it’s not for a good reason but still, it’s nice to see my grand-boss Dror on television regularly explaining cybersecurity to the German public.
Even given that this is an amazing job description, you don’t often see companies describing themselves as a ‘socio-technical system’. This is a great way to show off both your care and your depth of thinking.
Something that sounds so basic and is so very important but that can be very difficult to achieve when you’re in the thick of it: “Work on the business, not in the business.”
The newsworthy thing about the Accenture/Hertz story is not that they failed to deliver but how badly they failed and that they are getting sued for it. Getting something that’s not very good for far too much money is an accepted part of doing business with consultancies of that size.
Some amazing work by Morten Just turning a phone into a 3D mouse using all the sensors that it has embedded in it. This is mindblowing and hints at all the things that are already possible using the technology we have.
Most of my programming career has been focused on keeping things simple and eschewing premature abstractions summarized aptly by: “duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction”
I loved this summary of Julie Zhuo’s new book “The Making of a Manager”(excellent points in there about one-on-ones, self-awareness, delegation and growth) and I can’t wait to read the entire thing.
I’ve been trying to figure out what makes for the best kind of professional working relationships. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t and sometimes they really take off.
I didn’t think I’d live to hear one, but WIDI is a German language podcast (by Igor and a different Johannes) about technology that adds a unique perspective and a more systemic approach to the mix. If they manage to keep it niche, this will be a must listen for a German language audience.
I think it’s lovely that you can do stuff like this these days in Jira (Cloud at least) but given the choice I still would pick more or less anything else.
A thorough and hugely insightful breakdown of six software rewrites with the conclusion that you can always create something new without throwing away the value you already have.
A lot of sense and clear rules about tool usage in this article about remote native organizations by Pablo Carranza. It makes me itch to go back to working remote however much I’m enjoying my current office setup.
After listening to this very enjoyable episode of @ tech_done_right, I’m left wondering which companies here on the continent implement the hiring best practices (standardization, diverse panels, take-home alternatives) mentioned in it.
I didn’t think I would be working with MISP, a threat intelligence platform written in PHP but now I am and here you can read a bit more about the various things we’re doing with it.
An excellent talk by Tanya Reilly about the career impacts of technical and glue (non-technical) work especially for underrepresented groups: “Being promoted is diversity work.”
I’m not a data scientist but I’ve been trained for it (as part of my computer science degree) and I’ve worked in a bunch of related fields. I wholly endorse this take by Vicki Boykis on the state of data science and what you need to be successful at it.
I really like this way of looking at team success, but I’d clarify that success means that a team not only holds each other accountable but me as well.
First, they spent most of their efforts building strong relationships between Griffin’s tribal members—its employees, volunteers, and patients. Second, instead of telling people what to do, they engineered experiences (such as the retreats) in which staff members would look at the same issues they were dealing with, so that strategy became everyone’s problem. Third, they got out of the way and let people contribute in their own way to the emerging tribal goals.
As you probably know, for every piece of subpar work you accept, for every missed deadline you let slip, you begin to feel resentment and then anger. You no longer just think the work is bad: you think the person is bad. This makes it harder to have an even-keeled conversation. You start to avoid talking to the person at all.
A couple of weeks ago I took the train to Hamburg and back to present at the Good School. Here’s a picture of me in action courtesy of The Good School.