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Here is to a great 2017!
November of 2016 marked five years of my work at Liquid Analytics. On New Year’s Eve in 2011 I wrote: Breezing through your day at work is a recipe for stagnation. Any spare brain cycles you have at...
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What does a Chief Software Architect do?
For many years I couldn’t understand what software architects do. Early in my career, I thought they were useless. As a young developer, I felt that I could do the job of a business analyst, software...
View ArticleTeleportation can corrupt your data
My employer issued me two phones – an iPhone, and a desk phone. I rarely use my desk phone. Most of the time I don’t pick it up when it rings because in 99% of the cases it is a vendor cold calling me...
View ArticleOn elephant graveyards
Some years ago I heard someone sarcastically say “This is where elephants come to die” in response to me asking them what is such an intelligent person as them still doing in that company. Since then I...
View ArticleTools of the craft
Developers should feel empowered to configure their environment and development tools to their liking and contribute to the shared team standard. They should know the libraries they picked and why they...
View ArticleGood idea fairy strikes when you least expect it
I am the wrong Chief Architect for the Good Idea Fairy to prey upon. You see, I am a very practical and pragmatic Chief Architect. I know what I know, and I know what I don’t know. I solve problems by...
View ArticleAm I getting old or is it really ok now to trash your employer on social media?
Employers do search candidates on social media — and so should candidates. No one wants to work for a company that trashes its’ former employees and candidates. No one wants to hire a candidate that...
View ArticleGood developers can pick up new programming languages
We shouldn’t be recruiting developers based on some single technology they know but on what they can learn and apply in the future. A generalist developer that can pick the right tool for a given...
View ArticleWhy don’t they tell you that in the instructions?
The nature of our jobs as software engineers is such that we must deal with externalities. Hardware will crash. Services will auto-scale up and down. Garbage collection will occur. Humans will make...
View ArticleThe Toxic Clique
Working with the same group of people for 20 years is probably as bad for your creativity as working on the same project for the same company as long. Your skills stagnate, your ideas become inbred,...
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