History doesn’t move in a straight line. I remember growing up in the seventies and eighties, and even as a child understanding that the world could end at any moment due to forces beyond my control. A computer might misinterpret sunlight on high altitude clouds, a world leader might make a stupid joke, and the […]
Writing a blog is weird. You have some idea that you want to express, and you use declarative sentences that make it sound like you know what you’re doing. Meanwhile, you’re still going through your normal life, making mistakes, trying and failing to meet the bar that you describe. One of the most important things […]
This is the second post in a series of advanced technical topics. In the previous post, we discussed idempotence, the idea that some code must be written such that it can be run multiple times with the same inputs and deliver the same results and side effects. The post was running a little long, though, […]
A couple of years back, I ran a series of posts which tried to explain what it meant to achieve mastery in software engineering, including a tongue-in-cheek answer to the question of what it meant to work on hard problems. But looking back, none of these really answered the question of what kinds of hard […]
I’ve had the luxury of working at a number of companies with strong engineering cultures. They were typically led by one or more bizarrely talented engineers, and had built frustrating but effective hiring processes that ensured a high quality (if slow growing) technology organization. The majority of candidates didn’t pass the interview, and while there […]
Learning piano is hard. Like, bizarrely hard. To really excel takes years of practice – hours every day of finger exercises, practice pieces, recitals, lessons with beloved teachers and taskmasters, running fights with parents, lost opportunities to do other activities, and on and on. When you look at an accomplished pianist, you see the end […]
The software industry has gone through a lot of changes in my lifetime. When I entered college, most universities still didn’t have real computer science departments – they were just tucked inside math or electrical engineering as a sub-specialty. The web exploded a few years later, which led in turn to an explosion in non-technical designers […]
Negotiation is hard. There are all kinds of books, seminars, and coaching out there, but most engineers don’t get any kind of training before being thrown into the deep end. One day they need to buy a service, contact a vendor’s sales team, and muddle their way through an impenetrable contracting process. After a few costly […]
The business model is well-understood – the same as any casino or street corner hustler: get the user addicted, then raise the price. But AI is at such a different scale, what with their estimated seven trillion dollar infrastructure needs and – until now – dime bag pricing. So how are they going to pay for all that? […]
Interviewing is a strange process. Most of the time you answer the same question over and over again, asked in different ways – “What kind of a role are you looking for?” “Let’s go through your job history.” “Describe the architecture of a system you’ve implemented.” But every so often there’s a new question that forces […]