I spent 20 years slaving away at companies doing development, maintenance, troubleshooting, architecture, management, and whatever else needed doing. For all those years I was a permanent hire, working on technology from within.
Working in Cloud Native consulting , I’m often asked about who should do various bits of ‘the platform work ‘.
Bootstrapped operators who take their hiring seriously all eventually end up designing a system with the same fundamental approach. Here's how you can do it too.
No advice is good for everyone, but these are at least worth considering
In a 2019 talk/rant titled “Everyone Watching This Is Fired”, games industry veteran Mike Acton rattled off a sample of 50 things he expects of developers he works with. The title refers to his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that anyone who doesn’t meet all these requirements would be immediately fired.
The email landed in my inbox around 10:05/am, alerting us of an all-hands meeting in 15 minutes. “Guess we got acquired”, we all thought. 16 minutes later, we were all laid off. This was February of 2001. I was first alerted of my uselessness in 1995, when ~ fresh out of college ~ I worked ... Read more
Learn how to onboard engineers with an empathetic and structured approach. Includes a 30-60-90-day check-in template.
Building software looks a lot like building a house, but selling the two couldn't be more different.
Because your lifeblood, Revenue and Funding, are drying up
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
*Not literally all, but certainly those which I find most useful, and which also might not be all that widely known.
A pattern of short tenure – multiple short jobs over a small period of time – can be a red flag, but necessarily. I’ll dig into short tenure in this article. What’s “short”? What’s a “pattern”? When you’re thinking of switching jobs, when and how should your tenure factor into the decision? For hiring managers, when…
Scrum has given us a lot, but its time for some conscious uncoupling
My significant other works for Electronic Arts, and I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse. EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging…
A big fan of advice posts and productivity guides, here's my contribution to the genre.
Michał Tajchert — Chief Technology Officer. Mobile, platform & eCommerce engineering. Warsaw, PL.
Since a long time ago, companies hire agencies for help in design, accounting, social media management… you name it. While this was happening for a long time and is now considered the norm, t…
If you follow Gamefromscratch on Twitter, you may have already seen this tweet I put out last night about a blackmail demand that was made against our YouTube channel:First off, I really want to give a gigantic shout out to all of the people that helped get the message out, the tweets, retweets and even [...]
Question : Do developers in your organization have full admin rights on their own computer? Rationale : While blocking admin rights might ma...
Start your freelance business on the right foot by avoiding common mistakes that you will hold you back from victory.
“I’m going to be 29 anyways, so I might as well be 29 with a Master’s.” — me 5 years ago debating whether I should take classes On June 5, 2017, I started taking classes at Tufts University while working full time. On January 4, 2022, I submitted the final draft of my Master’s thesis. Much like my past self had hoped…
Ops is hard. What have learned so far?
In which the author expostulates on his odd notions about sports, music, and life
A recap of the recent interview process with several companies, what I learned, and what others should know.
Also see: cold emails (with examples) Here’s how Travis Kalanick’s inbox looked like back in 2013: Source (perma) If you wanted to reach Travis — and keep in mind that at some point during the last six years he probably hit #inbox1m — would you just send him one email and hope that it wins the lottery when he randomly…
