Category: Uncategorized
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The Beatles 🤝 Timeless leadership lessons
The Economist, The Beatles and the art of teamwork: Take the role of Ringo, for example. When he is not actually playing, the band’s drummer spends most of his time either asleep or looking bewildered. When the other three musicians bicker, Ringo smiles beatifically. To a casual observer, he might appear dispensable. But musically, nothing […]
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Better know a standard library
Read your current/new language’s standard library. Highly recommended for developers of all experience levels. You’ll pick up the idioms, you’ll discover something useful. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder if they’re making a sequel! My favorites are prelude.hs (which, sadly, does not seem to be the file that Haskell bootstraps itself from any more 🤔) […]
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Offloading fast operations in Ruby by data structure
Noteflakes: A Compositional Approach to Optimizing the Performance of Ruby Apps — the idea is to offload “inner-loop”-type operations from Ruby to C-extensions. The clever twist is this happens via data-structure-as-language. Ruby being Ruby, you can wrap a DSL around the data structure generation to reduce the context switch from Ruby to offloaded operations. There’s […]
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Don’t be spooky
It’s possibly the best advice for managers I’ve given so far. When you’re communicating with your team, lead with context and reassurance. Never message someone on your team, “let’s talk when you get a minute”. That’s void of information and scary as heck! I have to remind myself of this when I’m rushing. It’s faster […]
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Would you pay more for a noisy computer?
Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense, Matt Webb: I kinda miss the days when I could hear the hard drive of my computer. If it was taking a while to response (say, when opening a big file), there was a difference between the standard whirr chugga chugga ch-ch-ch chugga seek pattern, […]
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Math-y and/or word-y
I’m a developer who (formerly) recoiled at math, especially calculus and matrices. Instead, I thought, I loved the language-y parts of software development. Programming languages, little languages, domain-specific languages. Designing the names, concepts, and relationships in APIs. Domain-driven design, jargon, modeling. I thought of myself as more of a writer-y developer than a math-y developer. […]
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“Rationalize and solve” doesn’t help someone who is venting
If you’re doing the whole servant leadership thing, you’re gonna hear some people venting frustrations. Yihwan Kim, When a 1:1 turns into a vent session: As an engineering manager, I’m learning that a big part of my job (perhaps my only job) is to help people solve problems. I happen to enjoy solving problems myself. […]
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One priority is like wind in the sails
It’s true that I can scale myself, teams, and organizations to walk and chew gum at the same time, but it is surprisingly effective to focus on one thing at a time. This is the essence of “priority” — put all my energy into one outcome until it’s done. Then the next one, the next […]
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Planning focuses our ideas
Planning is essential. But, not too much. Mostly in the next 90-day window (with apologies to Michael Pollan). Humans are, with few exceptions, awful at planning. It’s impossible to see the future. We rely on our previous experience over data too often. Or, not enough. Or, in the wrong combination for this scenario. Beyond a […]
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Working, directly & small
Omar Rizwan recollects that one of the original selling points of React was that you could consolidate all the HTML, CSS, and JS for a single component in one file. No navigating across large directory trees to find the one line of code that implements the behavior you want. Far less worrying “if I change […]
Adam Keys is typing 