You’re six months into a project when you realize a tiny, simple assumption you made at the start was completely wrong. And now you need to fix the problem while keeping the existing system running—with far more effort than it would’ve taken if you’d just gotten it right in the first place. Today I’d like to tell you about one common mistake, a single word that will cause you endless trouble. I am... »
It makes sense that founders and investors spend so much time talking about things that go well. If we spent all of our time dwelling on the companies that failed, we wouldn’t have time for much else. When people do talk about company failure, they often do so in a way meant to make them seem wise by breaking down all the lessons they’d learned through failing. I did something like this when we sh... »
There are about 5.5bn adults on earth; 5bn now have a mobile phone, 3.5-4bn have a smartphone, and 800m of those smartphones are iPhones. We connected the Earth, and Apple did pretty well out of that. The trouble is that once you connect all the people, there are, well, no more people, and growth becomes a challenge. So smartphone sales are flat-to-down year on year, Chinese smartphones sales are ... »
In early 2012, I published Jumping into C++. According to the calendar, I wrote the book between January 2010 and January 2012, but it took me less than 200 hours of work. I know this because for most of the time I worked on the book, I kept careful track of my time spent. Between 1/4/2010 and 9/29/2011 (when I stopped keeping track), I’d worked on the book for almost exactly 156 hours and wr... »
Recently I was making sure my main laptop is ready for travel1, which mostly just entails syncing up the latest version of my music collection. This laptop is a Thinkpad X200, which turns 11 years old in July and is my main workstation away from home (though I bring a second monitor and an external keyboard for long trips). This laptop is a great piece of hardware. 100% of the hardware is supporte... »
Looking to learn more? While you’re here, I’m thinking about writing a book on this topic. Sign up here for updates. Intro While still in college (go Broncos!), I teamed up with Alex (@slevenbits) to create a startup. We were young, inexperienced and naive. Our first project was called YippieMail and it was an email aggregator. Simply put, YippieMail could display all your webmail a... »
What’s the story with Frontend Engineers and HTML these days? I’ve been speaking to quite a few recently who just don’t seem to understand it. I mean, they understand some of it. They understand what a div is and what a span is, and as long as it all looks good and works when they click on it, they’re happy enough. So many that I’ve spoken to have answered questions about HTML with things like “Oh... »
During my Microsoft career I had the opportunity to work on a number of projects that resulted in patents for which I am listed as an inventor. Setting aside the issues surrounding software patents and patent trolling in general, what pride I possess in any patent attached to my name has almost nothing to do with the patent itself, the filing and granting of which are largely the work of attorneys... »
I’ve been developing SW at google for 15 years now, though mostly not with the job title of “software engineer” but rather as a senior tech manager (“uber tech lead”, was the monicker for that) or as a senior-staff “technical solutions engineer” (whatever that may mean: it changes by the group/team/area, and by the year). I would say that maybe 1/10th of my coding time over these 15 years was “ext... »
In 2016, an anonymous confession appeared on Reddit: “From around six years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work.” As far as office confessions go, that might seem pretty tepid. But this coder, posting as FiletOFish1066, said he worked for a well-known tech company, and he really meant nothing. He wrote that within eight months of arriving on the quality-assurance job, he h... »