What to Read
If you’re choosing software, I wrote a somewhat irreverent guide on how to do that. Even software engineers will find it useful.
If you’re a developer, I wrote a career course. If you’re early in your career, it’ll add a million dollars to your lifetime earnings by giving you a clear, upward path. Supposedly knowing a little about negotiation adds a million bucks (compound interest, etc.), and this goes way beyond that. Many (most?) senior devs don’t know this stuff.
If you are considering going to college, or have a kid, I wrote how you’re probably going to waste $200K on your education. But also, how not to waste that money.
If you’re curious about how America will radically change over the next 5-10 years, I wrote about the rise of the robot chauffeurs. Or as most call them, autonomous vehicles. I spent weeks researching it, and can’t tell you how many times my mind was blown.
I also give talks on careers and programmer productivity, if you need a speaker for your conference. Reviews have all been positive.
While I’m changing how you see the world, here are three documentaries that have done that for me:
Latest Articles
What’s the Developer Experience?
I’m going to tell you what everyone misses when choosing enterprise software, and also explain the slow demise of so many enterprise software companies.
Enterprise Software Explained
I recently wrote a hit article on buying enterprise software, and I was working on the followup when I realized that you, the manager tasked with choosing it, could benefit from an overview from an insider. I'll explain how this software is packaged and delivered so...
Ask a Repair Shop
This is the story of how you’re buying your enterprise software the wrong way. Probably your appliances, too. This is an excerpt from my guide, "Enterprise Software Confidential." This post is also available in Chinese thanks to Xu Zhi. Some years ago, I had a broken...
Officially an Athlete
Big news everyone! I'm officially an athlete. OK, I see confusion on some of your faces, so allow me to explain. I was in a department store, looking to purchase some trousers. I saw some from the Dockers line of the Levi Strauss company, in a style branded...
An Education on Education
I had a very expensive education. But it was at a good school (RPI), ((Less famous for being the oldest engineering school in the country than for its 4:1 gender ratio.)) in the right major at the right time. ((Computer science during the dot com boom.)) So upon...
Upgrading to Grails 3
Preface I'm upgrading an app from Grails 2.4 to 3.1 and thought I'd take share my thoughts and notes. First, I want to say that I'm very grateful to the maintainers for all their hard work. I know this wasn't easy. Second, I'm not a full time coder anymore, but a...
Notes From Thee Linux Conference (SCALE 14)
I attended SCALE for the first time this past weekend and highly recommend it. They had not only talks, but all-day training sessions for which you would reasonably expect to pay hundreds of dollars. I also got to meet Jenkins founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Apache Bigtop...
Painless Documentation (What If You Won the Lottery?)
Abstract: Sometimes good things happen to good people. When something good takes away someone you depend on, will you be prepared to go on without them? With a little low effort documentation and knowledge transfer, they can leave you without torpedoing the schedule....
GGTS vs. IntelliJ IDEA
For years, I’ve been hearing about the superiority of IntelliJ over Eclipse from its enthusiastic fan base. However, I couldn’t find any evidence to persuade me to switch. I’ve had my frustrations with Eclipse, to be sure. I’d love to find a great replacement for any...
Dropwizard, JDBI, and Metrics
I recently attended the SBJUG talk on Dropwizard, which is less of a framework than a collection of libraries for developing self-contained REST web services. I had been hearing a lot of buzz about it recently and wanted to see how it compared to Grails. It is...