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Do More Faster, Part 1 – Idea and Vision
How can you accelerate your startup or new product? Ship it, share it and get feedback. “Many entrepreneurs are hesitant to share too much about what they’re doing and, even when they do, they hold back some of their thoughts even when talking to people who could be incredibly helpful to them.” So say Nate…
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How To Become An Engineer With People Skills
My mother told me when I was young that people get hired for their technical skills, and fired for their people skills (specifically a lack thereof). And I’ve seen this play out in the real world repeatedly. Assessing whether someone can code a sudoku solver is a lot easier than assessing whether someone can maintain their…
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Relationship-building counts as work
“Relationship-building counts as work.” That’s a great quote from in the latest article from First Round Capital Review: 23 Tools to Make Feedback Meaningful. As Phin Barnes writes: A lot of people skimp on the time they spend in one-on-ones or feedback sessions. They might dash off a few notes if they’re solicited, or think…
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Revealed: The 4 Reasons Amazon Web Services Got Approved
In the summer of 2003 Amazon was a fast-growing online bookstore. Nine years old, it had pioneered many innovative components of e-commerce that we take for granted today: customer reviews, a personalized shopping experience, relevant product recommendations, and frictionless buying. Jeff Bezos had founded the company in 1994 and began selling books online. His advantage,…
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Recommended Reading: The Log, what every software engineer should know
Today I found this absolutely superb article on distributed systems and the central role of the log: The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data’s unifying abstraction It’s a technical-but-readable exploration of the role of the humble log in databases and distributed systems. The article lives up to it’s title and I think…
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JavaScript in the Data Center?
First I saw that PayPal was using Node.js for production services. Then Airbnb. What the hell is going on? Well, a pattern is emerging: A new product or service team starts operating in lean-startup-style. This means rapid-prototyping so you can have quick build/measure/learn cycles. There are a many choices for a rapid-prototyping stack, including: Ruby-on-Rails,…
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Can I explore your API in a browser address bar?
I like this best practices guide to designing APIs by Vinay Sahni. In it he offers some excellent advice, but one particular design principle is worth heeding and has lots of implications, namely the API should be “explorable via a browser address bar.” This means several things (some of which he mentions, some of which…
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Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact
Is there an alternative balanced between between permanent employment and contract employment? Reid Hoffman (CEO of LinkedIn) proposes the tour of duty in this month’s Harvard Business Review: “firm but time-limited mutual commitment with focused goals and clear expectations.” When possible, a tour of duty should offer an employee the possibility of a breakout entrepreneurial opportunity.…
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The one cost engineers and product managers don’t consider
I love this article from Chris Gale, VP of Engineering at Yammer – The one cost engineers and product managers don’t consider – which is about reducing complexity… On the product side, your best tool for eliminating complexity cost is data. Studies show that most product ideas fail to show value, and many even remove value. If…
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Are coders worth it?
An interesting long form piece in Aeon Magazine by James Somers – titled “Are coders worth it?” – aims to examine whether web developers are worth the six figure salaries that they currently command in their first year of employment. I am a web developer, and there has never been a better time to do what I…
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