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Posts tagged with Engineering

Preserving a Pair Programming Culture

I've written about how I like Square's pairing interview process: it's hands-on, it allows for a more realistic environment for writing and running code, and it can be a learning experience for both…

Real World Code does not Suck

Reading this article about how crappy code is in "the real world", you would think that all software is written by developers either too dumb, or too smart – which is just a conceited way of saying they'…

Coding to Last?

I read this pretty interesting article on the engineering of pedals and hinges, the life expectancy of components and the rigorous testing for reliability in mechanical parts. Engineering is ultimately about tradeoffs, and this was a classic example of balancing…

Are Startup Engineers Untalented?

It's cool to do a technology startup. Conventional wisdom has been that employees from big companies get tired of the lack of impact, the bureaucracy and the middle management, and the ones who have smarts and ambition will…

The Hubris of Front-End Developers

A colleague pointed me to an interesting article by a senior Yahoo front-end engineer. It goes through what companies need to do to hire "great FE engineers", that A developers are attracted by other A players but…

Vimtastic

Late last year, I finally made the effort to learn that other text editor, vim. I knew the basics of emacs from school, and I had always relied on simple, graphical text editors like Textmate and domain-specific IDEs along…