Aka, how do I know if a product leader knows what they're doing? There are thousands of articles, courses, and guides on how to build a roadmap for product managers. Even with all these resources, roadmaps often become a point of contention between product managers and their stakeholders. There
If issues, pull requests, and project boards are the best way to develop software, should they not also be the best way to manage software development?
A blog about game engines, graphics, C++, and more.
It’s been over a year since I wrote Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Or, as it was called in Technical.ly Philly,… Read more > What happened next
Systems are constrained to follow the communication patterns of their designers.
Note: If you disagree with what’s expressed in this post, I encourage you to also take a look at my more nuanced and comprehensive post on the topic of code duplication, which gives a more thorough refutation of some of the popular ideas around duplication. “Duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction” is a…
Part 2 of a blog post about my time on the computer science job market in 2021-2022, in which I discuss my personal decision-making process between offers.
Why shifting full accountability for high-risk tasks to third parties increases rather than decreases project risk.
As part of the same process outlined in Matthias Clasen's "LibreOffice packages" email , my management chain has made the decision to stop a...
For the past several years, I’ve run a learning circle with engineering executives. The most frequent topic that comes up is career management–what should I do next? The second most frequent topic is measuring engineering teams and organizations–my CEO has asked me to report monthly engineering metrics, what should I…
What I write about my own personal journey is intended as just that—my personal journey.
A coding question, from the viewpoint of an Google/Amazon/Microsoft interviewer
In a recent article written for Slate, journalist Dan Kois recounts the shock his younger coworkers expressed when they discovered that he had, earlier in ... Read more
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. (Niels Bohr) If you unexpectedly find a problem solving itself almost effortlessly, and you can’t quite …
Your success is now determined more by the success of your team than by your individual contributions.
On the topic of life lessons from a born pessimist.
Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are...
Programming lessons I’ve learnt over the last 7 years.
It wasn't appealing to begin with
Well, this is new. After ten years building a company around the Cucumber open source project, I suddenly find myself out of a job. I...
Zoom fatigue is a real phenomenon, resulting from prolonged virtual meetings. This post explores its causes, including cognitive overload and lack of movement, and provides practical tips to combat it. Learn how to improve your virtual meeting experience and increase productivity.
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
People don't usually share what a research grant pays for, so here are the budgets from mine.
Every time I hear about software maintenance as a distinct activity, I cringe. That’s because it is based on the outdated notion that first software is developed, then it is maintained. But t…
Resilience is coping with unexpected events and environmental change. To have resilience, you need slack. Slack in software development lets people do the little tasks that keep the work moving smo…
When I started writing online, the advice I got was to publish frequently and not overthink any single piece. The logic was this: the outcome for blog posts is a heavy-tailed statistical distribution—most pieces will be read by barely anyone, but a small subset of outliers will do hundreds if not thousands of times…
Motivation by itself gives us the willingness to do something, but nothing more. Once we make a start, the game changes and it becomes about knowing how to make progress.
Some tips on writing a cold email.
