How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths
A field guide that also covers why we need to rethink our expectations, and what software engineering really is. A guest post by software engineer and engineering leader Addy Osmani
Software Engineering Radio: Marcus Blankenship on Motivating Programmers
Marcus Blankenship discusses programmer motivation (and de-motivation), which is key to job satisfaction, performance, and turnover. Travis Kimmel spoke with Blankenship about why engineering motivation matters, the unique motivation needs of engineers, mentoring and coaching for motivation, 1:1s, and self-motivation.
Software Engineering Radio: Joel Spolsky on Startups: Growth, and Valuation
Joel Spolsky (“Joel on Software”), founder and CEO of Stack Overflow, discusses lessons of building successful software companies. Host Nate Black spoke with Joel about the venture funded “land grab” situations vs. “bootstrapping with profitability”. How do venture capitalists think and how can you make fundraising easier? What’s the strategy to keep as much ownership of your company as possible? Besides growth and revenue, a third factor of a company’s valuations is risk. “Proof points” are a way of demonstrating low risk and will earn a higher valuation. What is the deciding factor for whether you will be successful when starting a company? What do founders risk when failure doesn’t mean going hungry? Rants include: what software companies still get massively wrong, how to do remote teams right, how developers undervalue their time by reinventing the wheel, how to make sure you are happy in your next job, and how to be a good citizen on Stack Overflow.
Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently UPDATE: We’ve written an entire book on this topic! Read it online: Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters. Agile star…
It’s tempting to air your grievances at your exit interview. Don’t. There’s almost no upside to speaking up, and tremendous potential downside. Avoid exit interviews if you can. If you must go, be totally bland; say nothing negative.
Throughout my career, the biggest mistake I see engineers make is doing too much work on their own before looping in others. I’ve experienced this mistake as both an IC and a manager. A…
20 Things I've Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer
Important, Read This First You’re about to read a blog post with a lot of advice. Learning from those who came before us is instrumental to success, but we often forget an important caveat. Almost all advice is contextual, yet it is rarely delivered with any context. “You just need to charge more!” says the company […]
Time for a pop quiz. 1. Code Reuse is: a) Goodb) Bad 2. Reinventing the Wheel is: a) Goodb) Bad 3. The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is: a) Goodb) Bad Of course, everybody knows that you should always…
It wasn’t even supposed to be called Anthem. Just days before the annual E3 convention in June of 2017, when the storied studio BioWare would reveal its newest game, the plan had been to go with a different title: Beyond. They’d even printed out Beyond T-shirts for the staff.
This is the third post in my full-stack dev (f-s d) series on the secret life of data. This installment is about a single text message: how it was typed, stored, sent, received, and displayed. I sp…