It’s campus recruiting season again, which means that career fairs will soon be flooded with hopeful companies looking to find the next generation of amazing students to build their paradigm-shattering, game-changing, world-beating visions of glory. Or CRUD database apps. Whichever. This is also the time when people like me write blog posts about how to […]
I sometimes have dreams where someone’s trying to shoot me. They shoot, and I run, and I don’t look back, and – lucky me! – they miss. Such is the logic of dreams. Working in product development can sometimes feel like that. You add a feature with a big new data store, and – poof! – […]
For those of you new to the blog, this is my monthly report on my attempt to use shame, peer pressure, and financial disincentives to get into shape. August was a strange month. For starters, at the beginning of the month I went on a week-long vacation with family, during which I ate, drank, and generally […]
As I’ve moved into my new operations role, I’ve been continually struck by just how much everyone around me knows. They all seem like polymath geniuses, weaving together a dozen different knowledge domains to come to startlingly insightful diagnoses of intractably obscure problems. Coding a clever algorithm is all very well and good, but that doesn’t get […]
Being in close quarters, away from your own bed, pillow, clothes, shower, pots and pans – everything that gives you a sense of home and comfort – can be an extremely stressful time that exposes everyone to each other’s worst behavior. Kind of like a normal project getting close to release. There’s so much to do […]
College recruiting season is almost upon us again, and I’ve been doing a little research to try to find a new question. My current question is OK, but it’s a little clunky, and I’ve been sniffing around for something new. In my research I’ve been going through Programming Problems. It’s a good compendium of the different […]
Well, it’s time to check in on my exercise and diet goals. I’ve never had New Year’s resolutions that lasted more than a week, and I didn’t particularly expect these to, either. So I didn’t really have any long term goals beyond “lose weight” or “get back into shape”. Well, it’s taken seven months, but I’ve […]
It’s hard to believe it’s already past the middle of July, that summer’s half gone, and that you’re two-thirds of the way through your internship. You might not realize it, but the next couple of weeks are a critical period during which much of the career value of the internship can be gained or lost. […]
It’s easy enough to step on a landmine (or swallow a grenade) when interviewing for your dream job. But what about the interviewer? How can you screw up an interview with your dream candidate? Don’t ask forbidden questions It’s amazing how many people are asked to interview without being given even the most basic instructions […]
There’s something simultaneously inspiring and incredibly disheartening about following the tweets of a professional writer like @nkjemison. Here’s a well-respected author with a half dozen books in print, and you’d like to believe that she just sits down whenever she likes, bangs out a couple of perfect pages, then goes off to whatever larger-than-life stuff authors do […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 