The other day I read What I Wish I Knew When I Started My Career as a Software Developer, an article in Lifehacker adapted from a Quora answer by Michael O. Church. I haven't stopped thinking about it since. I guess I find it so thought-provoking because, while I agree…
29 posts tagged
Tech & Business
The Shifting Definition of Front-End Developer
Until the advent of the web, professional software development didn't have a front-end/back-end dichotomy. There were C programmers, Pascal programmers and FORTRAN programmers, but the language they used was a detail rather than a reflection on their background and career path. Then the web came along, triggering the influx…
Is 2015 the Year for Reasonably Priced International Data Roaming?
I went to dinner with a friend of mine a couple of months ago. He was visiting Prague from Israel and carrying two phones with him so he could use both Czech and Israeli SIM cards. The reason? He "couldn't afford to pay the international data roaming charges."…
Remote Developers, Not Immigration Policy, Are the Real Solution to America's Tech Skill Shortage
Paul Graham's latest essay makes an impassioned plea for more liberal immigration policies in the United States for high-tech workers. Software startups are desperate for great developers, he writes, and the notion that we can meet this need simply by training more Americans is idiocy. The only way to satisfy…
Here's How Your Mom Would Want You to Develop Software
We had a heated debate today in our weekly all-hands developer meeting about whether agile points should be given to bugs and chores as well as features. We use the story types mandated by Pivotal Tracker. In a nutshell, features are stories that add clear value to the user (so…
"Because We Can" is Not a Good Reason
The two business books that have most influenced me are Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm and Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive. Grove’s book explains that, for long-term success, established businesses must periodically navigate “strategic inflection points”, moments when a paradigm shift forces them to adopt a…