Rands in Repose: Managing Nerds
Ten years ago, the world was collectively freaked out by the Y2K bug. The idea was that when innumerable software-driven clocks flipped at midnight from 1999 to
John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
( 33:45-35:53 from John Gruber's keynote speech at The Çingleton Symposium, a conference which took place in Montréal on October 14th and 1...
Rands in Repose: The Noise
It started that morning when you actually had time to go to your favorite coffee shop on that Wednesday morning. You, like many of us, had a bunch of time off f
Enslaving your interns for evil and profit
I should be in the middle of an interview right now. About fifteen minutes into it, in fact. About the part of my interview where we stop talking about awesome stuff the candidate has worked on in the past and start diving into writing some actual code. A stack with O(1) data access that also always knows its maximum…
Hire For The Ability To Get Shit Done
I have found that the two biggest causes of having to fire an employee at an early stage startup are a lack of culture fit, and the inability to Get Shit Done. I don't care how smart someone is - if they are unable to work hard and crank out a large amount of high quality work, they will weigh down your startup.
Why I do my resume in LaTeX
I’m guessing most of you have seen the comic explaining how a programmer reads your résumé. No, I don’t do my résumé in LaTeX just to get the +12 bonus. There are a handful of reasons I think it is a good idea. It stands out My résumé isn’t written in 12 pt. Arial or Times New Roman, which sets it apart from 75% of…
Why I Left Google
Jean Hsu - Fractional VP Engineering | Engineering Leadership for Startups
The Rise and Fall of the Independent Developer
I’m old enough to remember a time before the Internet. I know what it’s like to develop software both with and without a worldwide network. Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980’s. Of course there have been improvements in our tools and techniques, but the basic act of creating…
The joys of maintenance programming
Introducing new web service to determine if a number is odd or not. No new code dependency in your npm modules. Can use with almost any programming language, not just Javascript under node.js. No license. Easy to test in a web browser
The $150k Solution
An article was published yesterday in one of Austin's local papers about Austin's tech talent shortage . I was job hunting just a couple months ago and get a lot of calls from recruiters and hear about friends' companies who are hiring and I think it's pretty damned accurate. And by accurate I mean that it points out…
My Career Advice: Make Yourself Redundant
Early on in my professional life, I was given some fairly terrible career advice: make yourself indispensable .