Panelists Mat Ryer, Ashley McNamara, Johnny Boursiquot, and Carmen Andoh discuss the process of getting hired, hiring, and job interviews. If people are the most important part of a team, how do we pick who we work with? What’s the process like? How can it better?
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This post by Eduards Sizvos is loaded with wisdom: You can escape this crazy hiring race by creating an environment, where experienced developers mentor less experienced developers. Hire for attitude, and teach technical skills. Be the company that says: we are hiring mentoring. This pairs nicely with our mentorship discussion with Emma Wedekind and next week’s Go Time on hiring and job interviews.
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We’re talking with Emma Wedekind about going from zero to thought leader in 6 months. We talk about the nuances of UX including the differences between an UX Designer and a UX Engineer, we touch on “the great divide”, and we talk about Coding Coach — the open source project and community that Emma and others are building to connect software developers and mentors all over the world.
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Today’s XKCD is a must-see for all of us script killers writers out there. The img title is classic: And because if you just leave it there, it’s going to start contaminating things downstream even if no one touches it directly.
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According to Mike McQuaid, the focus of an open source maintainer should be learning to mentor efficiently — where should you be investing your time? If you’re an open source maintainer lucky enough to have a significant number of contributors you need to learn to mentor efficiently. First timer issues are not the right good way to get people involved in your project nor mentoring individual first-time contributors. Instead, do things that help all of them.
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This pretty much sums up the point Jeremy is trying to get across with this post on A List Apart and the future parts to this story of “Responsible JavaScript.” I’m not here to kill JavaScript — Make no mistake, I have no ill will toward JavaScript. It’s given me a career and—if I’m being honest with myself—a source of enjoyment for over a decade. Like any long-term relationship, I learn more about it the more time I spend with it. It’s a mature, feature-rich language that only gets more capable and elegant with every passing year. Yet, there are times when I feel like JavaScript and I are at odds. I am critical of JavaScript. Or maybe more accurately, I’m critical of how we’ve developed a tendency to view it as a first resort to building for the web…
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Our friend Henry Zhu (of Babel “fame”) has a new podcast all about maintainers: How can we work together to achieve a common goal: whether in our code, cities, or infrastructure? Henry Zhu chats with fellow maintainers across all disciplines of life on their process, motivations, and struggles as they learn in public.
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Thorsten Ball writes on his personal blog: Different programming languages are good at different things and bad at others. Each one makes certain things easier and in turn others harder. Depending on what we want to do we can save ourselves a lot of work by choosing the language that makes solving the type of problem we’re facing the easiest. That’s one of the tangible, no-nonsense benefits of learning more languages. You put another tool in your toolbox and when the time comes you’re able to choose the best one. But I would go even one step further. I think it’s valuable to learn new programming languages even if — here it comes — you never take them out of the box. But why? Languages shape the way we think, each in their own peculiar way. That’s true for programming languages as well…
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From walking five miles from his home to the office, no food all weekend, to using saunas and ice baths in the evening… Dorsey only eats dinner. Sometime between 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. he has a meal of fish, chicken, or steak with a salad, spinach, asparagus or Brussels sprouts. He has mixed berries or some dark chocolate for dessert and also sometimes drinks red wine. “I’ll go from Friday ‘til Sunday. I won’t have dinner on Friday. I won’t have dinner or any meal on Saturday. And the first time I’ll eat will be Sunday evening. I’ve done that three times now where I do [an] extended fast where I’m just drinking water,” Dorsey says.
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Get your free learning on! Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central , writes for freeCodeCamp: Seven years ago, universities like MIT and Stanford first opened up free online courses to the public. Today, more than 850 schools around the world have created thousands of free online courses, popularly known as Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. I’ve compiled this list of 550 such free online courses that you can start in March. For this, I leveraged Class Central’s database of over 11,000 online courses. I’ve also included each course’s average rating.
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Steve Klabnik: Open Source advocates prefer permissive licenses, and Free Software advocates prefer viral/copyleft licenses. What’s the difference? Well, that’s the topic for a different essay. Because here’s the thing: the jig is up. We’ve already hit the root problem. And you probably didn’t even notice. It took me a long, long time to notice.
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Nikita Prokopov writes on his personal blog about eight (8) common sense practices to use when hiring software engineers. I’m not an expert in hiring for big companies, but I have extensive experience for small ones and a bit of common sense. If you are in a business of hiring software engineers, big companies’ practices are not your friends. Common sense, fairness, tolerance, real interest, and open-mindedness are.
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We’re talking with Adam Barr, a 23 year Microsoft veteran, about his book “The problem with software,” sub-titled “Why smart engineers write bad code.” We examine that very idea, the gap between industry and academia, and more importantly what we can do to get a better feedback loop going between them.
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Are you or someone you know trying to move into the engineering department from a position that’s unrelated to software engineering at a company? …I wanted to pursue computer engineering. I’d been at Artsy for a bit less than two years at that point, first as a marketing intern working on SEO and then as a coordinator on the CRM (read: email) team. I’d consistently been working on small technical projects; first doing some work on a tool for SEO optimization for our Editorial team, then building emails with MJML, and a few other bits and bobs. But I didn’t think of it as a serious pursuit. It was Artsy’s Engineering team that convinced me that programming was something that I both wanted to and could do. Our engineers have always welcomed learners and been happy to answer questions and empower other teams to do technical work. I eventually realized that the parts of my work where I was coding were the parts I enjoyed the most, and that I would likely feel more fulfilled if I made programming my full-time occupation. (Gosh, that opening sounds like the first line of a pharmaceutical commercial. Sorry about that!)
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An interview with James Shubin (DevOps/config-management hacker and physiologist from Canada who works on a next-generation config-management project he started called mgmt) about his open source work and how it contributes to the cloud native landscape.
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Two new terms have recently emerged around software delivery: Software Defined Delivery and Progressive Delivery. Why? How do they relate to Continuous Delivery? Several forces today make delivery increasingly complex. Notably, proliferation of repositories, with hundreds of small projects replacing a handful of monoliths; desire for greater automation to realize the full potential of CD across multiple environments; the rise of feature flagging; and increased evidence (such as the Equifax debacle) of the need to bake security into the delivery process.
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What defines a strong technical leader and engineer? Jessie Frazelle shares her thoughts on this subject on her personal blog: In this post I will define what it means to me to be a distinguished engineer or technical fellow and maybe others that agree will modify their ladders to incentivize people to resemble these qualities.
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If you open source your work to (speculatively) make lots of money… you’re doing it wrong. There are much easier means to that end. But there are plenty of good reasons to do open source for free. Here’s three of them.
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Chris Coyier joins Suz and Jerod to continue the discussion on The Great Divide in front-end-land. We also use this as an opportunity to gush on how much CSS-Tricks has done for the community, get Chris’ perspective on the history of the website, and finish up by sharing some amazing Pens on CodePen.io.
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Read this Twitter thread from Lara Hogan. Get wisdom. Here’s an excerpt from the thread: I’m giving a talk today about Mentorship and Sponsorship and how they help folks grow in super different ways. Managers most frequently default to mentorship mode when they’re helping their teammates grow, and that’s… not quite right, exactly But the magical mode is SPONSOR MODE. Also, read “What does sponsorship look like?”
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Austen Allred, Co-founder and CEO of Lambda School, writing on why they’re doing this: Our goal at Lambda School is to help our student really succeed to the best of their ability and to remove the barriers that are currently preventing more people from being able to access a high tech education - and the career, financial, impact and other benefits that come with it. We know that one of the hardest parts of deciding to go back to school is figuring out how to make it work without a full time salary. By launching this Living Stipend Pilot Program, we are looking at how we can create more products and innovative ways to help support our current students - and to expand who can become a Lambda School student. They’re not looking at financials or credit scores, instead applications will be screened by asking just two questions as criteria for selection: Why do you need this living stipend to be successful as a Lambda School student? Tell us a bit about the unique part of your story that will make you a valuable addition to both the Lambda and tech community?
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4 minutes and 8 seconds of pure entertainment. If you watch this and don’t bust a gut, I’m sorry to report that you have no soul. 😆 (h/t Mathieu Isabel who shared this in response to our viral tweet from yesterday)
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What are your thoughts on simplicity as a feature? Max Böck has this say… I think there’s a lot of value in actively questioning the need for complexity. Sometimes the smarter way to build things is to try and take some pieces away, rather than add more to it. For example… Static sites are on the rise again now, precisely because they are simple. They don’t try to manage server-side code with clever abstractions - they don’t have any. They don’t try to prevent security breaches with advanced firewalls - they get rid of the database entirely.
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What would happen if everyone in your company was reading and responding to incoming support emails? In this post, Simon Schultz shares why he spends more time on incoming support emails than internal reports, plus six good reasons you should do so as well. I love my numbers, and I love my spreadsheets, but the heart and soul of all the great people using and being in contact with your service, product and company are too often buried somewhere in a soulless column in your beloved spreadsheets. Valuable insights, information, and data are too often ignored and forgotten.
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This path might not be for everyone, but what’s important to think about while reading Alex MacCaw’s story is…IT IS POSSIBLE. I started working on open-source libraries and publishing them on a blog. This quickly gained a bit of a following resulting in offers of paid consultancy. They say that on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog. Well, in this case, nobody knew I was a 15-year-old schoolboy working on consulting gigs between French classes. My grades were getting lower and lower, and I realized there was no way I was going get into a computer science course with my poor math scores. When I discovered I was making more than my teachers’ salaries, I came to a sudden realization: why do I need to go to college? I could just drop out!
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