The Daily Developer

Join me as I talk through some hard-earned lessons on hiring and recruiting. Links: * The Daily Developer * Firing Well * The Five Dysfunctions of a Team This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedailydeveloper.substack.com

Links: * Why are non-DRY specs more maintainable? * The Maintainable Software Podcast Episode with Jeanine Soterwood * Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey * Patterns of Software by Richard Gabriel * The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg * Sandi Metz: Duplication is better than the wrong abstraction and POODR This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other sub...

Ah, yes, the standup meeting. Love them or hate them, there’s a 100% chance you’ve encountered this in your career. Most standups are done very poorly. They often feel like useless checkins designed to ensure that you’re around and paying attention. The worst feel like an enforcement of attendance at work - a virtual version of “butts in seats” type of management. However, when done well, they are...

One time, when I was a little bit desparate for some cash, I took a gig writing some ruby code for a nontechnical team. This team had a founder and a separate ceo. In my first week, my gut told me the CEO was probabaly not going to be very effective. I couldn’t have told you why, it was just a gut feeling. After a month or two, it became very obvious that the founder didn’t want to relinquesh cont...

You have tech debt you need to address. If only you had dedicated time to fix that one longstanding issue, that one bug that you hate, or redo that thorny part of your data model. The list goes on. It’s a tale as old as time. Here’s the thing. Your role exists only because the business is alive. And the business lives because your customers are getting value from your software. Asking the business...

Everyone you work with will remember how you made them feel. If you are remembered as someone who loves to engage in debate and grudgingly give in when you’re proven wrong, that’s a failure on your part to recognize the opportunity in front of you. Instead of focusing on which person or idea is right and who’s wrong, try to realize that such classifications are often themselves misguiding. Shiftin...

If you want to have an outsized impact on the world, on your team, on your product, or whatever, you will almost certainly have to work hard. This isn’t a popular notion in the age of Twitter, where such an idea is often dismissed as “hustle culture”, labeling it as toxic. But it’s true. Whether you’re trying to make a dent in the world or climb up the technical ladder at your company, you can’t e...

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedailydeveloper.substack.com

Have you ever heard anyone use this phrase to describe someone? I have. It’s actually an incredible compliment. To describe someone as your favorite colleague means so many things to me - it conveys trustworthiness, professionalism, no-b******t, a certain level of skill, and so much more. I think there’s one thing that every single developer can do to elevate themselves in the eyes of their collea...

I learned so much from my first software engineering job. Some of the lessons make me squirm a bit. When I joined this company circa 2010, they were using subversion. If you weren’t around then, subversion is a version control tool that predates git. Indeed, git and github were still new kids on the block, and there was a competitive version control tool called mercurial that was compelling to man...

When I first learned Java, I set to work creating a chatroom program. Mind you, I didn’t have any other friends who could run this program on their computers, so there was literally nobody to chat with. I also didn’t know how hard it would be. I used AIM every day, I thought - how complicated could it be? I ended up writing what I now know as a new protocol. I used Sockets and Streams and wrote pa...

Wilson sat across from me at one of my early programming jobs. I remember when someone would walk up to him, in person, usually stressed out, and urgently describe to him an issue they had encountered with the software. What did Wilson do? Did he fume? Did he throw a temper tantrum at being interrupted? No, he smiled. Smiled! He smiled and wrote down everything they said and told them that he woul...

When faced with a challenge, we all default to use the tools we know. For so many of us, that’s code. Whether it’s needing a new blog, a solution to a parent’s tech problem, organizing photos, needing a personal organization system, or thousands of other examples, so many times we reach for software. I remember the first time I met someone who, faced with a challenge like setting up a marketing bl...

Early in my career I worked closely with an extremely experienced engineer on a python project. I was headstrong and egotistical about how great my code was. He was quiet and unassuming. Guess who wrote better code? One time while I was observing him write code, I was struck by how much his version control system was interwoven into his entire process. After writing or changing a piece of code, he...

Tension is required to make something wonderful. Whether it’s a difference of opinion, perspective, or passion, the combination and debate between and amongst differences makes for a diverse garden of ideas. Someone once explained this to me using the analogy of erecting a circus tent: in order to put a big tent up for everyone to enjoy the show, you must apply tension in exact opposite directions...

In my first day on the job, I was tasked with synchronizing our python application’s user accounts into our support software via their API. Easy enough, I thought. Like a disciplined engineer (I thought), I created a new sandbox account to test this API integraton against. Ran the thing like 100 times, fixing bugs along the way. About an hour later, I got a message from our CEO informing me that a...