Ideas

One of my favorite problem-solving questions is: “What’s wrong with this idea?” It drives the conversation away from why the idea might work, and toward why it might fail. That perspective is invaluable when building. ...

I think a mark of a great engineer is being willing to change one’s mind when presented with new information. Here are four technological things I’ve changed my mind about. ...

If something in your software is confusing to a customer, it is confusing. ...

Today I’d like to talk about a quality that’s essential to success as a computer programmer. Let’s call it “comfort with discomfort.” ...

I’ve been a practitioner of Shawn Wang’s ‘Learn in Public’ for years. In this post, I’ll share a list of ways I’ve found to learn in public. ...

When I was learning to program, I was fortunate to pair with very experienced engineers. One day while coding, I said: “I think we need to use Ruby’s map method, but I’m not sure how that works. Let me look it up.” Later, my pair offered some feedback: “You can’t be looking up map. You need to know how all of Ruby’s Enumerable methods work.” ...

How do you introduce new ways of working? We want to bring a new idea to our engineering teams, such as a new command-line configuration, testing tool, or design pattern. But engineers can be discerning and stubborn customers. The idea needs to stand on its own. And, you have to sell it. ...

We’ve all seen a desire path. They are footpaths created by erosion from human and animal traffic that communicate a wish for a path that doesn’t exist. When you walk on a paved path toward a destination and notice a shortcut in the earth, that’s a desire path. It’s the way people go, rather than the way we would wish them to go. ...

Ben Kuhn’s ‘Think Real Hard’ shares a problem-solving checklist from the scientist Richard Feynman: Write down the problem. Think real hard. Write down the solution. On its face, this advice is ridiculous. If only we just sat and thought about the problem, we’d win a Nobel Prize like Dr. Feynman! ...

I used to have a bad habit when working alone: I’d start a feature, begin doubting my approach, throw away my work, and start over from scratch. Sometimes more than once. The result? Wasted energy, abandoned code, confusion about what I had and hadn’t implemented, and repetitive rework. This post is a collection of thoughts on this practice. ...