What's Your Engineering Culture?
When evaluating companies, it’s of utmost importance to learn about the engineering culture. Culture for a company is similar to scope for code – culture provides a context for getting work done.
Concepts
12 posts.
2016
TLDR Programming Concepts
Trying to concisely describe concepts is an interesting exercise. The ideal goal is to build upon existing concepts, but as you add more concepts you run the risk of being inconsistent.
Two Kinds of Abstractions
When someone talks about abstractions, they’re usually trying to make the software more flexible. But that’s usually one of two kinds of abstractions.
Design of Software Solutions
What’s the best way to model a solution? In software, there’s several common ways of building solutions that solve specific problems. It’s worth trying to identify their characteristics and the …
Observation
The more you learn, the more this skill seems to be necessary. When missing a bug or a refactor opportunity, I wonder how did I miss this? Sure, everyone wants to learn from their mistakes. But …
Modeling the Domain
Let’s mentally build an API for an e-commerce site. Let’s say we’re tasked with building the cart & checkout portion of the API. Building a RESTful API seems like the natural choice. At first, a Cart …
2015
Daily Processes Check-In
Instead of sounding prescriptive, this article is much more descriptive.
Going Fast by Going Slow
People always ask about how did you learn this or work so quickly doing that? It’s a tough question to answer elegantly. And it’s a cop-out to vaguely say I spent my free time looking into that …
Process is King
There’s a process behind every result.
Communicating as an Engineer
As an engineer, one of the most valuable skills you can have is to communicate effectively. This applies both to your fellow engineers as well as non-engineers (PMs, designers, business). Obviously, …
Mental Schemas
It is difficult to always be improving in the software industry. In creative fields, many artists talk about churn. When starting out, there’s an enormous amount of work to produce to get better. If …
Software as Bridges
Software is always challenging to explain to non-engineers and having a metaphor is valuable to explain complex concepts. Bridges happen to be a good analogy to software. But the devil is always in …