I was working on my fireplace this past weekend. Specifically I had just finished ripping down the old surface to the red brick, and then preparing the brick surface with a layer of thinset for tiling. I spent all of Saturday cutting tiles and then placing them on the fireplace surround and hearth. Even with help it took 11 hours to do, and about 8 hours of it was measuring and cutting tiles.

Today an article was brought to my attention. One that, at the time of writing this post, had hit the front page of various sites (including Hacker News) and had been shared over 2,600 times. The article is On Secretly Terrible Engineers , which is a criticism of the tech industry and the mentality which it holds towards hiring both new and experienced developers/engineers.

Spoiler: I strongly disagree with most of this article. If you aren’t open to debates and discussion, quit reading here and return to your normal activities.

A Job Listing

Let’s say you were walking down a street one day and noticed an ad for help wanted. It is posted in the window of a bakery. It reads:

HELP WANTED:
Need a baker for FT work. Must be familiar with modern baking methods such as ovens, barbecuing, and deep fryers. 5+ years experience with the Super 6 commercial baking oven required (aside: came out in 2014). Nice to haves include experience with butcher’s blocks, chopping meat, and making candles.

Intro

We’re just two days from a brand new year and yet the primary measurement of a developer’s skill seems to be the same as it was 20 years ago. The most important classification to most companies is job title, as I talked about in great detail in my last post . The job title is acquired via working for a veritable slough of credentialist companies whose HR departments break it down very simply:

Intro

I’ve had a good career so far. I began working full-time as a programmer in 2008. At that time my title was Junior Developer. I had a decent boss and cool co-workers, and I cut my teeth on Java and .NET. It was a good experience. After 2 years at that gig, I felt that it was time to move on.

I contacted recruiters, and one eventually found me a promotion: Systems Analyst. It came with a decent pay bump and so forth, as well as the luxury of dropping “Junior” from my job title. As this was a good deal all around, I took the offer.

Intro

Like many of you, today I watched the Apple media event in which they announced both the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch. I’m not going to talk about the watch, but instead about the phone.

For years Apple has been a true cachet brand. They are a luxury item that is sought after for status and image. I don’t blame anyone for owning an iPhone: they’re reasonably sexy and you get to show off the Apple branding. Good on you.

Intro

Almost exactly 1 month ago today I found myself on a video call with Joel Spolsky. It feels insane to write that, even now, as it was a banner moment in my career. For me it was the equivalent of meeting a movie star who I had idolized since I was old enough to know what movies were. There had always been this Joel Spolsky guy throughout my career that I regularly read about and whose opinions on software development agreed with mine, and suddenly I was talking with him face to face. It was awesome.

The Problem

I think that most devs would agree when I state that the definition of success in the corporate world of development places less emphasis on “good” code and more emphasis on “working” code. Working code is code that can be released to production on or before the deadline, regardless of performance or even bugs in most cases. As a developer, you ultimately feel as if you’ve failed when you toil for nights on end to meet steep deadlines and churn out crappy code. As a business, however, you’ve succeeded when you hit the deadline. My experience tells me that the typical metric upon which development teams are measured is often not quality of code or unit tests or even performance, but instead ability to meet deadlines and deliver solutions to clients. You’ve failed when you do not meet the deadlines and thus piss off the clients/customers. Your job has become a veritable boolean result with the outcomes of true and false. Deadline met? True. Deadline missed? False.

Intro

Node.js – it has rapidly become the “new hotness” in the tech start-up realm. With each passing day, the fan base of Node lovers grows larger, spreading their rhetoric like a religion. How do you spot a Node.js user? Don’t worry, they’ll let you know.

One day you’re at a regular user group meeting, sipping soda and talking with some colleagues, when the subject turns to Node. “Have you guys tried Node.js?” asks one of the people in your group. “It’s all the rage. All of the cool kids in Silicon Valley are using it!” “What does it do?” you ask, only to be bombarded with a sales pitch worthy of the best of used car lots. “Oh, it’s amazing!” they reply, sipping their diet coke and shuffling their hipster fedora and backpack with MacBook Pro in it (or something like that), “It’s server side JavaScript. It runs on a single thread and it can do 100,000 web requests a second!” They glance at the group for the oohs and ahhs, but most people just stare back with amazement in their eyes. Then, your hipster Node-loving friend drops the words that start wars: “It’s way better than .NET” – and just like that, your group is hooked. They go home, download the Node.js tools, write “Hello World”, and suddenly they’re on their way to the next user group meeting to talk about how great Node is.

It looks as if the Visual Studio dev team may be implementing a new operator in a future .NET release. This is due in large part to community demand, which is pretty cool because it shows that the VS team is listening to their customer base; a key part of a successful product.

This new operator is likely going to take the syntax of ?. and is known as the Safe Navigation Operator.