Sabbatical week one is complete, and I’m finally finding some time to blog about it!

I had a pretty active week. It started with hurricane preparations as Dorian burled toward Florida, however in the end we suffered a very light glancing blow. In short, we got off easy.

The Bahamas did not get so lucky, however, and got pretty messed up. I’d love for you to take a moment to donate to their recovery here: https://www.bahamas.com/relief .

One of the most amazing perks of working at Stack Overflow is the sabbatical. After 5 years of FT employment, you are entitled to 20 paid days off (outside of normal vacation) that you can spend however you please. My sabbatical officially begins on Tuesday (as Monday is a holiday). Practically speaking, I am out from Aug 31 - Sept 30, returning to work Oct 1st. This is an amazing opportunity and benefit, and I can’t thank Stack Overflow enough for how well they treat employees.

In part 2 of my series on dev team interactions, I’d like to talk about conducting good code reviews. Most dev teams will find themselves in a situation where code reviews are necessary, and in my experience many do them very poorly. I’ve even worked in companies that had such a negative code review culture that people left the review sessions upset, even considering quitting. With a few easy adjustments, you can quickly learn to conduct excellent and positive code reviews with your team.

As a developer working for a company, you probably work on a team. The interactions on these teams are sometimes pleasant, and other times hostile. What’s interesting to me is that a lot of the time, a hostile interaction could have been a pleasant one if only approached differently. Hostile teams are created by the actions of the people on them, not by the situations they encounter. One such hostile action is blame.

Well, I’ve utterly failed to blog at regular intervals, writing only three posts in 2016. Ouch. To be fair, one of those posts is insanely famous (the one about NPM and left-pad.js), but still, I’ve really let my readers – and myself – down.

So, I resolve to write a blog post every single week of 2017, starting today. This will probably mean that I write slightly shorter posts, and maybe even multi-part series posts. My traditional style has been “come upon something that is really bothering me or is really tricky, and proceed to blog about it in great detail writing thousands of words for all to benefit from” which doesn’t really scale well. Instead I plan to take the approach of “write about a new or interesting topic each week, and see what people like and what they don’t like” which will hopefully be better.

On Plumbers

Picture this situation: you woke up this morning to find that there’s no water coming through your valves and taps. No sink water. No shower water. Having no plumbing experience, you call around for a plumber.

Plumber #1

Plumber #1, let’s call him Mario, tells you he can’t be bothered to come check out your issue because it’s minor and he’s very important and too busy for it. You explain that you really need a plumber, and he explains he’ll do it for 1.5x what everybody else costs, and only if you have lunch and coffee ready for him when he arrives. You have no water, keep in mind, so making coffee is an extra special effort.

Background

I’m going to discuss an important topic that affects everybody in tech: diversity.

No, this won’t be some preachy post about how diversity is great and how you should be a better human being. Rather, I’m going to tell you about the things I’ve experienced working on diversity – particularly the interesting events of the last few days that happened internally at Stack Overflow.

It’s no secret that the tech industry is not that diverse. It’s mostly dominated by white males, with a few women and minorities making appearances. Those who do enter the industry as a minority often feel marginalized and excluded.

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.

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: