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Never ask a candidate to rate themselves out of 10.
“How would you rate your knowledge of techonolgy X out of 10?” Is a terrible question, and here’s why. It’s entirely ambiguous, and depending on which interpretation you give, there’s really no wrong answer. On an obsessively literal level there are reasonable interpretations of the question such that most candidates would say 10, not out…
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What is DevOps?
I’m mildly annoyed by the type of pseudo-coherent thoughts that are apparently the norm around the idea of DevOps: “DevOps is a philosophy,” “DevOps is obsolete,” “Platform engineer is the new term,” blah blah. Here’s a timeless way to look at it, free of all hype and buzz, a take that’s as true now as…
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Objective
After a particularly difficult one-on-one with a stubborn direct, Jay took a moment to reflect and center himself. The report’s claim, though posed at him abrasively, had actually been interesting – “OKRs are simplistic bullshit, you know no complex system can be boiled down to these isolated measurements. If anybody seriously believed in OKRs we’d…
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My programming challenge
TRY IT OUT -> Zennish <- TRY IT OUT A programming puzzle inspired by a programming career. Professional programming involves balance between the opposing philosophies of architecture (GRASP, SOLID) and pragmatism (KISS, YAGNI). Over-architected code front-loads difficulty to solve problems that won’t necessarily ever come. Under-architected code causes exponentially more pain with each new requirement, like a house on…
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The “Hello” World
Have you ever been searching for a song on your favorite music service and scrolled through all the songs that matched your search. All of them? For example, top of the pop billboards at the time of this writing is Adele’s “Hello.” I scrolled for a while and got to at least 1,962 songs named “Hello,”…
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Don’t be an Architecture Hipster – A guide
One of my more popular HN comments was a teardown of an all-too-common engineering subculture. The article in question sought to teach “Software Architecture,” but ultimately annoyed me and many other HN readers. Tl; dr:Software architecture discussions are so polluted by software-hipsters that the majority of software engineers are disinclined to discuss and study architecture at all. Know-it-all /…