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Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It's hard to come up with an unbiased estimate of how long something will take, when fundamentally the work in itself is about solving something.
You are brought into a startup to run their three-person data team. This is a story about teams and organization, and how you spend a year getting the team to a good place.
How to build developer tools for happiness and productivity.
I was reading yet another blog post titled "Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y> (I forgot which one) and I started wondering if you can generalize it a bit. Is it possible to generate a N * N contingency table of moving from language X to language Y?
Erik Bernhardsson
This is a bit of a rant but I really don't like software that invents its own query language. There's a trillion different ORMs out there. Another trillion databases with their own query language. Another trillion SaaS products where the only way to query is to learn some random query DSL they made up.
People aren't incompetent or lazy, just busy doing other things.
How to sabotage software productivity, in the style of CIA
I made a New Year's resolution: every plot I make during 2018 will contain uncertainty estimates. Nine months in and I have learned a lot, so I put together a summary of some of the most useful methods.
A theory that cloud vendors will focus on the lowest layer of the infrastructure stack and startups will take over the software layer.
As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old code slowly over time? In order to understand this, I built a little thing to analyze Git projects, with help from the formidable GitPython project.
Apparently MTA (the company running the NYC subway) has a real-time API. My fascination for the subway takes autistic proportions and so obviously I had to analyze some of the data.
Software development still has a long way to go until it fully embraces the cloud
Erik Bernhardsson
The easiest way to be a 10x engineer is to make 10 other engineers 2x more efficient. Someone can be a 10x engineer if they do nothing for 364 days then convinces the team to change programming language to a 2x more productive language.
I have suspected for years that the classic buffet line system is a deeply flawed method, so I decide to simulate different methods to find out better ways
Erik Bernhardsson
I do a lot of recruiting and have given maybe 50 offers in my career. Although many companies do, I never put a deadline on any of them. Unfortunately, I've often ended up competing with other companies who do, and I feel really bad that this usually tricks younger developers into signing offers.