“You’re so lucky! You get to work in your pajamas!” That’s the most common reaction I get when I tell people I work from home. I don’t work in my pajamas. I’m pretty sure none of my colleagues do either. And if they do, they’re not sharing it. Obviously, it’s a personal decision, but, for me, when I’m in my pajamas, I want to chill, not work. And although my “office” is at times my recliner, I am working, not lounging.
My dad is a self-described contrarian and eccentric. I love that about him. He doesn’t ever do something because that’s the way you’re “supposed to.” He’s also incredibly driven and energetic. He’s a fixer. If he sees a problem, watch out. If it aligns with one of his passions, he’ll put all of his energy towards finding a solution.
There are 10 types of programmers: those who use an IDE, and those who think that the ones who use an IDE are not real programmers. I'll start by making it clear that I belong to the first group and do care _a little bit_ about the other group’s opinion. So I decided to dig a little deeper and collect opinions about this topic. The choice was either to become a real programmer and switch to a text editor, or to reinforce that I am a real programmer who uses an IDE!
Stereotype threat is especially pervasive in technology. For women, this manifests as the “girls are bad at math” stereotype. For men, it's more often “you have no social skills.”
One of the most important expectations we have for all team members is that he or she keep a daily journal. While I was skeptical when we first started this practice, now I can’t imagine our team functioning without it.
The process of renaming models in Rails can be very error prone. To just start renaming files and changing class names and search-replace variable names is fraught with peril -- so I figured having the ability to repeat the process, in essence fix my scripting mistakes and “do-over,” was important.
Docker's new Distributed Application Bundles are an exciting development. They have the potential to be revolutionary for describing the structure of a distributed application and making that description something that can be deployed as a single file.
An experience report of using Mob Programming at Corgibytes. Trust, which was already high, became even stronger. Clients became more engaged and several commented on how much value they were getting from working with the Corgibytes team. When clients felt like they were getting more value, sales, grew, too.
I had the pleasure of keynoting at Ruby Nation where I expanded on one of the core values at Corgibytes: Communication Is Just As Important As Code. This post is pretty much a transcript of my talk. I got great feedback and am looking forward to presenting on this topic more.
If we want our developers to have more empathy for our customers, we as employers need to have more empathy for developers. We need to cast off the stereotype of good developers being only those people who are emotionless, data-driven, Spock-like caricatures, and embrace the fact that as humans, we all experience emotion.