At MenderCon, we want to celebrate the software maintainers of the world and create a community where we can all learn from each other. Building on the organic community that's emerged from the podcast Legacy Code Rocks! this virtual event is a chance for menders all over the world to come together and talk about what makes improving software interesting and fun.
Yesterday, the CEO of Equifax resigned after 143 million Americans personal data was compromised in a security breach. Since I own a company that focuses on upgrading custom software, I'm getting lots of calls from concerned executives wondering if their systems are secure. After all, if Equifax could get hacked, that makes you think what would happen if your customer data was compromised, right?
Many programming languages use what’s called zero-based indexing. Counting starts at zero, not one. When building your career in tech, know there are invisible forces at play that are obvious once you uncover them. If you navigate your career without understanding this hidden framework, you’ll usually come up with the wrong answer. Let's take a peek at some of these hidden habits that are likely holding you back.
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 my current projects' Rails application is hosted on AWS OpsWorks. OpsWorks is a lower-cost alternative to Heroku and EngineYard that still provides a full-suite of features, from deployment to scalability and fail-over. As with most Rails applications, this application requires background tasks.
When I was interviewed by Corgibytes for a lead developer position, I was asked who were my role models. I responded David Heinemeier-Hansson (DHH) and Kent Beck. I expounded: DHH because he is a business developer rather than a computer scientist and he has great ideas about achieving excellence while maintaining a work/life balance. And furthermore Kent Beck because, as brilliant as he is, he still sees himself as a coder. Whatever.... The thing is, I lied.
While it's true that there are many software developers who do enjoy starting with a clean slate, there is also a group who loves working on making existing applications better. Rather than starting from scratch and building an 80% solution, these developers are ideal for taking over a project once it's become stable, and nurturing it for a long time. Neither developer is better. Both are needed in the software world. You just need to understand when to use each one.