One of the more curious things I've found, both in my time as a consultant and as a software management executive, is the striking differences between what the title "architect" means at different companies. Strangely (or perhaps, not so strangely), the nature of the job changes … | Continue reading
If you've spent any time on LinkedIn at all the past few years, you've seen the incessant posts about people "looking for their next challenge". Many of these are followed, sometimes weeks or months later, by additional posts (sometimes by the same people) about being really real … | Continue reading
A colleague pointed out a semi-scientific study about interviewees cheating with ChatGPT hosted by interview.io; the results are not particularly great if you're relying on LeetCode-style problems: "Predictably, the [interviewee group using common LeetCode problems without modifi … | Continue reading
For many years, people have ranted and railed against the dread managerial "Do you have a second to chat?" opening that has no context around it. Just Google "Can we talk" and you get something in excess of 4 billion responses, many/most of which talk about how to respond to thos … | Continue reading
A post on LinkedIn got a little close to my heart, showing a picture of Joe Flacco (an almost-retired NFL player, for those who aren't in to sportsball) and asking, "Are you overlooking experienced candidates because of their age? Take a lesson from Joe Flacco, who at 38 was writ … | Continue reading
It's that time of the year again, when I make predictions for the upcoming year. As has become my tradition now for nigh-on a decade, I will first go back over last years' predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I think the new ye … | Continue reading
With the enforced hiatus I've been on for the past 18 momths, I've had some opportunities to engage in a few projects that otherwise would've gone undone or unexeplored. One of these projects is actually indulging in a favorite pastime of mine: TableTop Role-Playing Games (or TTR … | Continue reading
tl;dr While having some conversations with a client, we got to talking about teams, processes, and how to partition work. I realized, as I was talking, that while RACI is a reasonable way of thinking about such things, it's a little complicated, and I prefer a slightly simpler mo … | Continue reading
tl;dr Recently, while sitting in the speaker ready room at VSLive Nashville, I had a lovely conversation with Angela Dugan and Amber Vanderburg about something I've been saying for a few years now: I don't want to hire passionate people, I want to hire professional people. Turns … | Continue reading
It's the age-old question of our industry--do we buy something to take care of a need, or do we build the thing ourselves? No matter which way you go, it seems like somebody comes around later and makes it clear you chose wrong. The deep secret, however, is that no matter which w … | Continue reading
tl;dr With the recent spate of AI-driven engines (like ChatGPT) that have been shown to be able to build applications from a complete spec, a lot of folks are having a bit of an existential crisis (or else gleefully pointing out somebody else's existential crisis). Nowhere is thi … | Continue reading
tl;dr It's a common problem, and one we've seen in the industry several times--a technology (language, framework, platform, whatever) is making a significant, backwards-incompatible change, meaning any code written in "v.N" (the current, stable version) will require some coding c … | Continue reading
tl;dr Tech has brought us many wonderful things, but if we take a step back from the hustle and bustle of recent releases, media excitement, and vendor advertising, we begin to realize that the tech-fueled vessel sailing to utopia that we were ready to embark on just a decade and … | Continue reading
tl;dr Developer Relations consists of a number of different activities that accomplish different things, but nobody's ever really sat down and talked about when to use which activity over another. I thought it was time to bring all of them together into a single, cohesive "whole" … | Continue reading
tl;dr Managers and leaders are often told contradictory things when discussing how to interact with their teams, and those new to the role often mistake collaboration for abdication of authority. Before we dive too deep, let me make one note about glossary here: Leaders are those … | Continue reading
tl;dr Many companies look to hire individuals who are both leader and individual contributor (IC) on the same team. These are often referred to as "Player/Coach" kinds of roles, and people in these roles often find a distinct lack of success over time. The problem is that this ro … | Continue reading
tl;dr Lots of companies are spending exorbitant amounts of time trying to track down and hire "full stack" developers, and finding them difficult to find. This is probably because there is no such thing, and reveals a deep weakness in the hiring manager's thinking. Definition As … | Continue reading
tl;dr: Newcomers to Developer Relations are often curious as to what, exactly, makes up the range of activities that a Developer Advocate (and related individuals) undertake. In this post, I look to provide an ontology and means by which to examine what artifacts satisfy what nee … | Continue reading
tl;dr: The Developer Relations org isn't exactly Engineering, but it's not entirely Marketing, and it often isn't really Sales. So if you're a company looking to find a home for your nascent (or currently-existing) DevRel team, where do you put it? Let's consider some of the trad … | Continue reading
tl;dr What would you do if you could do anything? Or, if you're a developer-manager-type, what would you build? Given that we're starting 2023, I thought it a reasonable time to take a stab at putting it out there into the universe. Part of the motivation here comes from the inte … | Continue reading
tl;dr Architecture is hard sometimes--people keep offering up some new idea that quickly becomes the mainstream "way to do it" without any context or nuance, and the industry, desperate to find ways to improve their architecture, snaps it up without hesitation. Microservices was … | Continue reading
tl;dr: In my 2022 Tech Predictions, I asserted that more companies would be building DevRel teams, and I've repeated that in my 2023 Tech Predictions. I have reasons for that; I've been at many wildly-different companies, many of which with wildly different business models, and I … | Continue reading
It's that time of the year again, when I make predictions for the upcoming year. As has become my tradition now for nigh-on a decade, I will first go back over last years' predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I think the new ye … | Continue reading
tl;dr: The recent collapse of Southwest Airlines' operations that forced them to cancel 2/3 of all of their flights across the country, which current analysis suggests was due to "outdated IT systems" (specifically their employee-scheduling system), reminded me of a conversation … | Continue reading
This one just crossed my feed today: Cadl, "... a language for describing cloud service APIs and generating other API description languages, client and service code, documentation, and other assets." In other words, you write this: import "@cadl-lang/rest"; using Cadl.Http; @serv … | Continue reading
I can't say how many times I've talked to new speakers who watch speakers and are amazed at how effortless their flawless presentations seem to go. Folks, part of the reason they go that smoothly is because they're practiced, but part of it is also that the speaker is often ready … | Continue reading
tl;dr: Solidify, a Sweden-headquarted consulting company, is creating a US division, and they've asked me to build it out. Hence, I am announcing the foundation of Solidify/US, a software development consulting company with deep expertise in DevOps (AzureDevOps and GitHub) and a … | Continue reading
tl;dr: Allen Holub is a smart, experienced developer whose seen a lot of things in his time. But his take on the bug tracker--that it "is a symptom of a deeper problem--insufficient focus on quality" misses the mark badly on a number of fronts, even as he is slightly right about … | Continue reading
A while back, Packt Publishing asked me to do a review of the book "Supercharge Your Applications with GraalVM", and while I wrote it up, I never pushed it to the blog. tl;dr, it's a decent book--a good intro to GraalVM, with some interesting tidbits in there, but not deep enough … | Continue reading
As I've mentioned on LinkedIn, I've been sans FTE employment since just before the holidays last year, and I'm using the time to do some re-shuffling of some of my "digital footprint" on the Internet. Let me explain a bit about what's going on here, mostly so that if you're consu … | Continue reading
It's that time of the year again, when I make predictions for the upcoming year. As has become my tradition now for nigh-on a decade, I will first go back over last years' predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I think the new ye … | Continue reading
It's that time of the year again, when I make predictions for the upcoming year. As has become my tradition now for nigh-on a decade, I will first go back over last years' predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I think the new ye … | Continue reading
It's that time of the year again, when I make predictions for the upcoming year. As has become my tradition now for nigh-on a decade, I will first go back over last years' predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I think the new ye … | Continue reading
It's that time of year again... well, actually, a few days late, but I've been busy, I swear. As has become my tradition now for nigh-on a decade, I will first go back over last years’ predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I thi … | Continue reading
It's that time of year again... well, actually, a few days late, but I've been busy, I swear. As has become my tradition now for nigh-on a decade, I will first go back over last years’ predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I thi … | Continue reading
tl;dr By now, everybody has heard of the memo that was passed around by the Google-bro, claiming that Google should reduce its efforts at explicit diversity hiring and how his message was unwelcome within Google's halls; my reaction is that he had a small point, but it was drowne … | Continue reading
It's that time of the year again, when I make predictions for the upcoming year. As has become my tradition now for nigh-on a decade, I will first go back over last years' predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I think the new ye … | Continue reading
tl;dr As part of preparing for a workshop next week in Poland, I've been diving back into the CLR source code---which takes me back to my old friend, Rotor. For those of you who came to the CLR late, back in 2002 Microsoft offered up an open-source version of the CLR called the S … | Continue reading
More than a decade ago, I published Effective Enterprise Java, and in the opening chapter I talked about the Ten Fallacies of Enterprise Computing, essentially an extension/add-on to Peter Deutsch's Fallacies of Distributed Computing. But in the ten-plus years since, I've had tim … | Continue reading
tl;dr In a recent blog post, a commenter asked some questions that I felt were a bit more easily answered in the main blog format than in comments. Specifically, he asked two of the more common "How do I..." questions---finding motivation, and finding time. In the "The Value of F … | Continue reading
tl;dr At last night's Seattle Languages meeting, I was reminded of what intellectually-honest debate does and does not look like; then, as part of the discussions and argument around the tragic deaths of several black men at the hands of police, I was presented with a link to a p … | Continue reading
James Ward also wrote an article on how to write abstracts, and I realized after I published that I forgot to call out to his article as well. Mea culpa. First off, James' post is here, and for the most part, I think we agree on most things. Where he says "Make the title clear, c … | Continue reading
tl;dr Once again I find myself in the position of needing to call BS on a blog post and deconstruct it: Yes, it is possible to be a good .NET developer, and here's why. First, as always, if you've not read the original, check it out. Again, I'll be quoting from it, so you needn't … | Continue reading
tl;dr Celebrating success is always a welcome thing. But in a lot of ways, the people we should be celebrating are the ones who failed, and then learned from it. As a matter of fact, there's a reasonable correlation to be drawn here---that those who are truly successful are the o … | Continue reading
tl;dr Recently the Harvard Business Review ran an article on how readers could prepare for difficult business situations, using the analogy of coaches preparing their teams for different eventualities by simulating those eventualities on the practice field. There's lessons to be … | Continue reading
tl;dr 20 years ago, the "Gang of Four" published the seminal work on design patterns. Written to the languages of its time (C++ and Smalltalk), and written using the design philosophies of the time (stressing inheritance, for example), it nevertheless spawned a huge "movement" wi … | Continue reading
tl;dr Peter Verhas asks a seemingly innocent question during a technical interview, and gets an answer that is not wrong, but doesn't really fit. He then claims that "Sometimes I also meet candidates who not only simply do not know the answer but give the wrong answer. To know so … | Continue reading
tl;dr A Forbes.com article Q/A recently stated that job-seekers need to hide the fact that they've ever been fired from a position, because of the stigma associated with such an action. I couldn't disagree more. First off, as is common for my posts, read the original, so we all k … | Continue reading