I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the difference between the journeyman and master years of software engineering, how you move from one to the other, and how one might accelerate growth. As part of this process, a more fundamental question has come up – what does it even mean to be a “senior” software […]
Category Archives: Performance
When I first joined TripAdvisor, we had a pretty involved branch merge process that usually took around two hours, and involved over a dozen distinct steps. There was some initial pain for new engineers, but no big deal, you got used to it pretty quickly, at which point it faded into the background – an […]
When you were a full-time hands-on coder, you probably tried to have many different types of coding experiences. Different languages, types of projects (web, mobile, shrink wrap, etc.), methodologies, coding responsibilities. Now that you’re a manager, the milieu may have changed, but the fundamental goal has not. Having different types of management experiences is important […]
There are lots of ways to fail. There are plenty of ways to annoy and frustrate your coworkers. And I’m not saying that these are small change, but there’s one sin that’s usually pretty easy to spot and almost always an indication of future failure. And yet, we sometimes let these people onto our teams […]
In a recent post, I spent a couple of paragraphs describing how you might help a new manager learn how to manage people, and came up with a combination of incredibly banal advice (“buy donuts!”) and vague and unhelpful handwaving (“people are different”). This bothered me, so I wanted to sit down and attack the […]
In a previous post, I talked about what it was that stars did differently, and how it didn’t require either 80 hour weeks or incredible genius to shine. But there’s another side to this, and one that doesn’t get as much air time. Everyone wants to know how to be a big success, but the […]
“Experience is a dear teacher” – Benjamin Franklin In previous posts, I’ve focused a lot on getting the right people in the door – great coders with great attitudes who communicate status aggressively, don’t wait for someone else to fix problems, and never let bad news wait. At which point, of course, there’s nothing for […]
Some people seem to get more hours in the day than everyone else. They’re omnipresent – jumping on problems before you know anything’s amiss, lending a hand to less experienced developers, killing it on their own code… Maybe they’re freakishly smart. Or work crazy hours. Or see things that seem obvious in retrospect, but no […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 