I am a Scala developer and speaker who was cancelled three years ago. Yesterday I attended the High Court in London to hear an apology from several prominent members of the Scala community for making untrue claims about me on 27 April 2021. I sued them for libel, and they admitted fault and settled, paying me costs…
I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that…
It can cause immense stress and can lead to burnout 🤯 Don't worry, we're sharing our mistakes, so hopefully you'll avoid some!
Why every manager should talk to their employees about stock options
Yes I know I'm technically on vacation but if I go too long without writing I die from a witch's curse and I don't want to work on longform projects For...
DX @ HuggingFace: Scaling open source ML community 200% a year with No OKRs & No Meetings
A good programmer is someone who can write large programs that have a high probability of being correct.
Examining the Devaluation of Software Engineer Titles and Its Impact on Tech Industry Integrity
Discover insightful advice for young people, emphasizing choices, confidence, and personal growth through lived experiences.
One year ago, I switched from charging project fees to day rates. It’s been transformative on lots of fronts. > Everything below comes with the following preface/caveat: > 1. There’s no univers…
A life by example
"I've worked with a couple of Staff Engineers on different teams in the past and I've seen them do different things, but I've not been able to pin down exactly what they do." I get this question quite frequently. Sometimes from engineers looking to elevate their roles.
The start of my sabbatical has given me a moment to reflect on my publications. But my CV only shows a list of neatly cataloged papers: title, authors, conference. Each one appearing no different from another. But how each paper ended up published is its own story, a story about people and opportunity.
Code reviews are supposed to be about improving code quality and sharing knowledge, but when PR comments start hitting the hundreds, something is very wrong....
In his book On War, Clausewitz defines friction as the difference between military theory and reality: Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which…
This article shares some of the lessons I learned from working full-time on a FOSS project for 503 days.
I provide this HTML version of a historical article because it was not easily available but was central to my article: Reagle, J. (2010). “Be nice”: Wikipedia norms for supportive communication. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (Special Issue on Web Science) , 16(1), 161–180…
My experience and tips for being a software developer contractor, in the UK
Jakob Nielsen has worked in user experience since 1983. Much changed, including moving from academia to practice but the mission remains!
How great would it be if the solution to most errors you face were in the first place you looked? That’s what the Arch Wiki has been for me: a massive wealth of information and troubleshooting resources to help me navigate the various configuration and installation issues I’ve encountered. Some people claim Arch Linux…
Eight years of organizing tech meetups
The context is smarter than you.
Over the past 6 years or so, I’ve failed each item on “The Turkey Test.” It’s very simple: will your code work properly on a person’s machine in or around th...
Silence can mean different things to different people in different situations. In this post, I’ll present a few incident scenarios and explore the role of the incident commander in breaking (…
Code review seems like a great idea, right? Two developers looking at the same code means two chances to spot problems; it spreads understanding of the way the project is evolving; the reviewer can learn useful tricks from reading the author’s code in detail, or spot opportunities to teach the author a useful trick…
Giving a talk is a lot like selling a car. Take them for a test drive, don’t read them the owner’s manual.
