Software-Engineering

After more than a decade in the field as an engineering leader and hands-on practitioner, I’m thrilled to be offering a consulting service. I am a strong contributor in three areas: technical consulting, mentorship, and workshops & teaching. Technical Consulting I love digging into tough problems in greenfield and legacy code. A few things I’m good at: Raising code quality (tooling, testing, monitoring & observability, building CI/CD pipelines) Big scary bugs Process improvement Internal/external communication and meeting/ceremony refinement Refactoring Complex feature building Requirements gathering and story-carding Pair programming, code reviews, and hands-on coaching Technical writing and documentation modernization Mentorship I have mentored dozens of software engineers. I love listening and helping people get better! My mentees are successful software engineers across the industry. I can meet on your schedule and cadence. ...

I think many engineers would be better contributors if they started to think more about the customer impact of their work. ...

Anytime you’re making a list at work, rank it. ...

A suggestion about data: generate it now, and figure out curation later. ...

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. ...

One common trait among early-career programmers is seeing technology choices in black-and-white. I’ve been there. “Redux is awesome!” “Nested ternaries are terrible!” As you advance as a programmer, for better or worse, you start to see almost everything as a trade-off. ...

TONY: We should take this outside. ...

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.” As programmers, we live in this unsettling space. Here are some thoughts on discomfort and tips for dealing with it skillfully. ...

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.” ...

Write a little bit of code, and you may come to an unsettling realization: there are multiple ways to do almost any programming task. How do we choose between several that work? I manage this uncertainty with a guideline: writing boring code. In this post, I’ll try to explain what boring means to me. ...