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Stories about Software

Jan
3

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Resolutions Like You Mean It

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , |

Let me start this off on an improbable foot by saying I’m not huge on the concept of New Years resolutions, per se.  But I do value reflection and improvement.  And if just after the winter solstice seems like a good time for it, don’t let me stop you.

Finding Feedback

Last fall, I began participating in a mastermind group.  If you have a W2, your employer will typically offer you rather paternalistic guidance under the heading of career development.  I call it paternalistic, since it generally assumes that your goals include working for the company forever, and emulating the people that have worked there forever.  But, set that aside, and you can often extract a bit of value from it.  For instance, you’ll get someone’s take on how to secure a promotion or get assigned to a better project.

If you go the solo consultant or entrepreneur route, nothing like this really exists.  I don’t think someone has used the words “exceeds expectations” in front of me for about 5 years.  This I attribute to the fact that nobody uses those words outside of the corporate performance review.  And I haven’t had one of those in half a decade.

A mastermind group, more or less, fills that gap.  A few people get together at some interval (weekly, for instance), brainstorm, share ideas, hold one another accountable, and offer mutual advice.  Pound for pound, this offers much more individual value than the corporate perf review/boss one on one because it focuses entirely on my goals, not my goals in the context of being a perpetual good solider.

Measure It

At one of the mastermind group calls, we laid out goals for 2017.  Not having done this before, I lurked more than participated, to see what sorts of goals these meant.  The other participants laid out real plans, with real numbers, to do things like change revenue by X% or shave Y% of time off of some operational concern.

I came to the table with vague notions of, “I want to spend less time in cold places.”  Part of this results from my tendency to let lifestyle goals dictate work arrangements.  But part of this comes from sloppiness and the consultant’s peril of not taking one’s own advice.

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Dec
29

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Happy 2017!

Category: Announcements | 5 Comments

I’ve slipped a bit from my usual cadence in the past week.  C’est la vie, I suppose.

I’ve been doing a lot of travel in that time, which isn’t really anything new.  I’ve also been doing some work, which also isn’t really anything new.  But, on top of those things, I’ve also been trying to relax a little while visiting and entertaining family.  All of this has led to me more or less disengaging from publication and social media this past week.  I imagine a lot of you are doing the same, though, so it’s probably no great loss.

This year, I offer nothing in the way of a so-called retrospective post.  In fact, I’m going to commemorate the impending flip of the calendar only by sincerely wishing you a happy new year and a big thank you for reading and keeping up with the blog.

In case you were curious, I have a lot of plans for the new year.  Here’s a quick rundown.

  • I’m hoping to wrap the preliminary draft of Developer Hegemony in the next week, and I’ll be launching the book in E-book and print in Q1, 2017 (audio book is also potentially in play).  Stay tuned for a lot more details about that, and also look for me on some upcoming podcasts and interviews.
  • I’m under contract for another Pluralsight course, so look for that in the first quarter as well.
  • Retrospecting a bit on the merchandise kickstarter, for better or for worse (not looking good).
  • I’ll be making the announcement of a new productized service relatively soon.
  • Look for me to appear as an author on a few additional blogs in 2017 as well.

All of that comes on top of my standard work and travel schedule, so the new year figures to keep me busy.  Hopefully you have a plan and prospects that you feel good about as well.  As I said, you have my gratitude for reading and following the blog, and I hope that you have a great year!

Look for me to resume my normal posting cadence on the 2nd or possibly the 4th of January.

Dec
22

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What Technical Documents Should You Review?

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , |

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the SmartBear blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, have a look at the posts by some of the other authors.

If you’re anything like me in your programming proclivities, there’s a kind of singular impatience that leaps into your mind around the subject of documentation.  On the consuming side, whether it’s an API or a product, you have a tendency to think to yourself, “I don’t want to read about it, I just want to start hacking away at it.”  On the flip side, when it comes to producing documentation, that seems an onerous process; you’ve already finished the work, so why belabor the point?

Those are my natural impulses, but I do recognize the necessity for producing and consuming documentation surrounding the work that we do.  Over the years, I’ve developed strategies for making sure I get it done when it needs to be done.  For instance, even as someone who makes part of my living writing and teaching, I still segment my days for the sake of efficiency; I have writing days and I have programming days.

In order for this work not to get shortchanged in your group, it’s important to develop similar strategies or commitment devices.  The work needs to get done, and it needs to get done well, or else it won’t be useful.  And peer review is a vital part of that process.  After all, you create process around peer review for code — the developers’ strategy for sanity checks and spreading of knowledge.  Doesn’t it stand to reason that you should also do this with the documents that you create around this process?

Let’s take a look at some documentation that your group may be producing, and explore the idea of having peer review to go along with it.  We’ll look at an answer to the question, “what technical documents should you review?”

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Dec
20

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Logging the Lights in Your Home

Category: .NET Tags: , , |

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the LogEntries blog.  You can find the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, check out the log aggregation service they offer and see if you could use some help storing and querying your log files.

It’s all the rage these days under the general heading of “Internet of Things” (IoT), but I have been a home automation enthusiast for more than 10 years now.  In the interceding time, I’ve done experiments and written about the subject.  I even published a Pluralsight course, in which I turned a Raspberry Pi into a RESTful server that lets you turn lights in your house on and off using basic X10 technology.  You can certainly say I have a lot of experience, both with newer techs and comparably archaic ones.

Because I’ve been in the game so long, you might think that I’m a strict constructionist, if you will, wanting to build everything myself from raw parts.  But I’m not.  Even though I enjoy assembling these systems from their components, I am a fan of the strides made by various vendors over the years, and I’m thrilled to see different players enter the space and expand home automation mind share in the general public.  In fact, I’m excited as a technologist that I can leverage already-assembled techs and services to achieve my home automation goals.

Introducing Wink

Against this backdrop, my mom recently gave me a Wink hub and companion lights for my birthday.  Wink is a service that does what I once quixotically sought to do in my spare time on weekends: it unifies disparate smart devices to allow centralized control over them.  The hub is synced with the Wink service in general, allowing control from anywhere, and the hub communicates over house Wifi with the satellite devices.  I can now turn on a couple of lights from anywhere in the world, with the workflow occurring as follows.

  1. I pop out my phone while vacationing somewhere sunny, open the Wink app, and tell it to turn on my master bedroom light.
  2. The Wink app phones home to the wink servers, communicating this request.
  3. The Wink servers pass the message on to my connected Wink hub at home.
  4. The Wink hub relays the message over Wifi to the light, which turns on.

It’s really pretty slick.  It also causes me a wry smile of amusement, since I just got a birthday gift that does out of the box something I worked for months to make happen.  But then I trade that smile for a genuine one when I think about how much more I can do in this landscape.

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Dec
18

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The Nature and Eventual End of the Journeyman Idealist

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 5 Comments

This is part 3 of the series about journeyman idealists.  You can read part 1 here, and part 2 here.

Hiring Ditch Diggers

We toil in an industry that loses sight of this basic problem, and no wonder.  In a simple scenario like that, we can reason about value.  But I’d like to employ an allegory to show how opaque that reasoning becomes at scale.  And in that opacity, the journeyman idealist reigns supreme.

Let’s say that I need to have a ditch dug in front of my house, and I have two competing laborers willing to do it.  The first one talks enthusiasticilly about soil aeration and the mineral properties of dirt in the area and whatnot.  He talks about the real craftsmanship that goes into ditch-digging and how people don’t realize that.  The other guy charges a few bucks less per hour, so I hire him.  How hard can it be?  And, besides, I can look out my window and see how it’s going.  If he fails and the ditch caves in or something, I can call the other guy that likes to ramble on about soil.

guy-digging-a-hole

But now imagine that I can’t actually see any of the progress as it happens, and I will only know if it went well when one day, either sewage backs up into my toilets or not.  Wow, okay.  Same labor proposition, but with opaque progress and all-or-nothing results.  Earthworm Jim now sounds more appealing.  I have no idea how Jim’s knowledge translates into money or outcomes, but I take it on faith.

Journeyman Idealist Ditch Diggers

Now imagine that instead of my house, I run a massive construction company and I’m building several developments simultaneously.  Jim is my digging foreman, and I trust him to make sure we dig ditches.  Jim asks people lots of questions about topsoil acidity and demands they estimate how many aphids could fit onto a leaf.  All of that seems kind of stupid to me, but what do I know?  The ditches get dug, so it must be working.  And, besides, for some reason every ditch digger around seems to want to work here because we have “interesting soil” and Jim uses that outsize demand to tell them that aphid-know-nothings like them deserve to start at a lower pay grade.

I have hired, in Jim, a journeyman idealist.  And he hires in and indoctrinates more of the same.

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