Engineers hate estimating things. One of the most-often quoted lines about estimation is “Hofstadter’s Law”, which goes: Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. If you want to deliver inaccurate information to your team on a regular basis, give them a 3-month-out product development timeline … Continue reading Software planning for skeptics
I wrote a letter in support of net neutrality and Title II classification of Internet Service Providers to the FCC. For background on this FCC vote, you can read this Arstechnica explainer. You can add your own comment in support of net neutrality to the FCC at the URL gofccyourself.org. To clarify some terms: “net … Continue reading In support of net neutrality
In September 2013, my startup, Parse.ly, had just raised Series A capital, and had just begun growing its team rapidly, from a small group of fewer than 10 to over 40 employees now. In the past several years, I have run Parse.ly’s fully remote engineering, product & design team. Back in 2013, we had achieved … Continue reading Parse.ly Culture: Ethics & Identity
Michael O. Church wrote an essay awhile back called “Why programmers can’t make any money.” The post is no longer on his website — for some strange reason — but you can have a look at the archived version here. If you don’t wish to read his post, this quote will give you the summary. … Continue reading The value of money in a technology career
Can pair programming be done in a way that is compatible with async communication? Pair programming is described by the original c2 wiki as a process in which “two engineers participate in one development effort at one workstation”. It would seem the process is inherently synchronous, at least as originally described and practiced. I experimented … Continue reading An async kind of pair programming
Python is the core programming language used at Parse.ly. It also happens to be a quickly-growing language with wide adoption among open source projects. It’s no wonder it’s quickly becoming the leading language for software teams. I’ve written a couple of blog posts with original material for learning Python, including “import this: learning the Zen … Continue reading The 3 Best Python Books for Your Team
I realize now that one of the hardest parts of running a successful startup is “betting” on tech stacks that, 3 years out, will have a groundswell of community support around them. It’s still shocking to me that when I chose each of the following technologies as a central part of Parse.ly, they were so … Continue reading Picking tech stacks
Esko Kilpi wrote: For most of the developed world, firms, as much as markets, make up the dominant economic pattern. The Internet is nothing less than an extinction-level event for the traditional firm. The Internet, together with technological intelligence, makes it possible to create totally new forms of economic entities… Also very small firms can … Continue reading Office extinction for knowledge workers and the rise of fully distributed teams
Joel Spolsky wrote his first blog post in a year today, announcing Trello, Inc., a spin-off company for the successful project management product Fog Creek Software developed, Trello. Trello has announced a $10M+ venture financing round and they are going to expand the product and team. This was a bit of a surprise to me, … Continue reading Joel Spolsky’s business operating system
I wrote this to a friend five years ago, a few weeks after I had quit my job to embark on the crazy ride that has been Parse.ly’s founding story. You said to me, “I am glad that you left because you sounded unhappy there.” But you know, I wasn’t exactly unhappy. I was just … Continue reading 5 years ago, I was bored
