At some point in a podcast series by Seth Godin he advises that you never give your house for collateral on a loan for your business. Of course you don’t want to lose your house, but that wasn’t his reason. If you put your house on the line …
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Encouraging Positive Engagement
In my last post on management I talked about a Manager Tools series, and summarized it as:
The message in these podcasts is: it is your responsibility as a manager to support the company’s decisions. Not just to execute on them, but to support them, to communicate that support …
Being A Manager Is Lonely
Management is new for me. I have spent a lot of time focusing on the craft of programming, now I focus on the people who focus on the craft of programming.
During the fifteen years I’ve been participating in something I’ll call a developer community, I’ve seen …
Middleage
This year I’m starting to understand what it is to be middle aged. I think I became middle aged in 2011, but this year maybe I know what that is.
When I was young I viewed middle age through the lens of a young person. I would think: to …
Professional Transitions (or: the shutting down of Mozilla Labs)
Since my last post about leaving Python, my career has shifted further.
Earlier this year Mozilla shut down its Labs group. It’s a little hard to tell – I guess we didn’t actually shutter anything, and though it was announced internally it is entirely unclear externally. But Mozilla Labs …
How We Use GitHub Issues To Organize a Project
Saying Goodbye To Python
This post is long overdue; this isn’t a declaration of intent (any intent was long ago made real), just my reflection about my own path. I left the Python world a long time ago but I never took a chance to say goodbye.
While I had moved on from …
The Order of Payment And Consumption Drives Content
Economics: incentives incentives incentives. I don’t know if I quite buy it, but it’s still a good lens for understanding why the market contains what it does.
I was reminded of those incentives when reading The Jenna Marbles Paradox: Why Are YouTube Videos So Terrible? The basic premise …
Why Isn’t Programming Futuristic
If you think someone is asking a rhetorical question, it is usually most interesting to treat it as though it is a legitimate question. Especially if we’re talking about something hard — driving down to underlying assumptions through this questioning process is interesting.
Applying this to Bret Victor’s talk …
The overuse of functions
A programming quandry (related to some thoughts I’ve had on locality):
The prevailing wisdom says that you should keep your functions small and concise, refactoring and extracting functions as necessary. But this hurts the locality of expectations that I have been thinking about. Consider:
function updateUserStatus(user) { if (user …