The software engineer’s career path is pretty straight forward at most companies. Starting at the intern or new grad level, there’s essentially a number of levels to progress through, each adding some amount of responsibility and technical complexity, until the rungs culminate into a position of leadership within a team. That position is either a […]
Random Walk is the classic investment tome. I have been meaning to get through it for a while now, but I’ve only recently had a chance to read through its timeless advice. I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised, but the payoff was much more…mundane than I had expected. The classic work provides the […]
Underlines are a big deal to Medium. Reading this post harkens me back to the days when IE hacks roamed the earth and web developers spent cumulative millennia discovering and implementing ridiculous patterns in code to take advantage of bugs in browsers’ rendering engines. For those who didn’t live through the dark ages of web […]
MMORPGs introduced the concept of games as a service almost two decades ago. It was and remains a straight-forward idea: pay $x/month, and we’ll run the servers that enable the online game to function as well as put some programmers and artists and designers to keep the game fresh by updating content in the game […]
On an episode on the Accidental Tech Podcast about “Software Methodologies”, it was enlightening to hear the conversation on waterfall versus agile development practices[1] from someone who really doesn’t see the need to implement project management because he’s worked alone for the past few years. Nothing beats the operational efficiency of one software developer, though […]
It’s been a couple of eventful weeks for mobile gaming, with some notable releases and twists and turns. In order of completely subjective industry importance: Threes! was released in the App Store. A well-polished, simple but addictive puzzler that everybody likes, which reminds me a bit of the fervor around Dots. Square got around to […]
I’ve worked, so far, for: A mid-sized financial software firm, Two small startups One multinational and global technology firm, and One big startup The work aside, I always made myself willing and available for interviews and hiring discussions; beyond shipping code, the next most valuable thing I could do was to grow the company, even […]
The Hemingway app has one job: strike out all the various superfluous, unnecessarily complicated, and verbose prose from a piece of writing. The appeal of using an algorithm-as-an-editor certainly caught the attention of blogs and media outlets, even as its success threatens to make yet another newspaper job redundant. Readability – both in terms of […]
I have a problem. I get bored/tired of how this blog looks. Given the time I spend every week writing and editing and posting, I overthink how impactful it makes its first (visual) impression. Compounded by the speed of design, my familiarity of front-end web development, and my own lack of design prowess, and the […]
I listen to Accidental Tech Podcast[1], and in episode 54, there was a hearty discussion on whether enabling warnings as errors in production – or in some cases, development – was a good idea. The context was around whether that kind of strict error checking could have prevented the #gotofail SSL bug that affected iOS […]
My alma mater, UC Berkeley, put out a progressive news release last week: for the first time ever, there are more women enrolled in the Intro to Computer Science class than men. It’s an amazing accomplishment in light of the male-dominated software engineering industry; much digital ink has been spilt about how uncomfortable women feel […]
As Paul Graham has infamously noted, for programmers of my generation, there is a significant cohort of guys – and this set is unilaterally male – who were poking around on computers when we were young and impressionable. These were not quite the hulking mainframe behemothen[1] of the generation prior, but the WinTel PCs that […]