As I mentioned previously, I’ve been running a reading group for the managers and leads on my teams. We just finished The Power of a Positive No, which was written by one of the authors of the highly influential Getting to Yes. This had been recommended to me by a member of TripAdvisor senior management, […]
Author Archives: Dan
Given my wife’s recent guest post, I thought I’d weigh in with my own response, based on some up-close and personal time spent with an Android phone after four years of living and playing with various models of iPhone. On the recommendation of my coworkers, I got a Nexus 4 – it wasn’t as new […]
[Note: This is a guest blog post from my wife. -Dan] My husband, Dan, spent a good four years trying to convince me to get an iPhone. He used every conceivable argument, including the angle that it would actually be less expensive than my (dirt cheap) cell phone service because we could sign up for […]
Being a single guy was fun. I could stay up all night programming, sleep in on weekends, hang out with friends, go to bars and clubs, hop on a plane on short notice and disappear on vacation for a week or five. I’d go out to a movie or restaurant without a second thought. I […]
Every once in a while, I have a conversation with my four year old that goes something like this: Me: Do you want to go to the playground? Him: YES! Me: No you don’t. Him: I don’t? Me: No, right now you want to lie on the floor, kicking at everything around you. Him (genuinely […]
I live in Rhode Island, and have been commuting up to the Boston area for the past four and a half years. On good days this takes under an hour, on bad days, well, you don’t want to know. Anyway, I quickly realized that this was going to be years taken off of my life […]
When I first started managing, I remember thinking that I knew what was going on in the team. How people felt. What the issues were. How people were doing. Which made it all the more painful when I was blindsided with reality a little while later. Times have changed, as have I (I hope), and […]
It’s hard to help people develop, especially when it comes to the soft skills involved in management. You can give them new responsibilities, push them with concrete tasks in areas in which they’re weak, or discuss issues and possible solutions… but this presupposes that you know what the problems are, and that you know how […]
Hi _______, First of all, congratulations! Taking responsibility for a new team is a big step, and the most public form of praise that you can get. There’s nothing that says “great job” quite like having large amounts of administrative tasks dumped on your plate. :) Second, I wanted to write a quick note with […]
This is the fifth part in a series about achieving mastery as a software engineer. The first part described senior software engineers. The second part discussed common flaws that could derail one’s growth. The third and fourth parts got as specific as possible about the skills you need as you develop, from junior, to mid, to […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 