Reader Question Round-Up: Corporate Culture, Code Quality and Counter Offers

Just when you thought I’d run out of steam, like some kind of content brown dwarf, I’ve found new life.  Seriously, it’s weird to look at the blog and see that it’s been a month since I’ve posted content.

Oh well.  C’est la vie.  I’ve got content for you today.

I just recently published another video (framed below) on my Youtube channel where, wow, I’m actually pushing 500 subscribers.  And I am, once again, answering reader questions:

1. How does caring about problem domain relate to ethical concerns about employers?
2. What is the new big boss’s real agenda for a “culture building” event?
3. New job offer after only 4 months at current employer and a counter-offer. Should I accept the counter-offer?
4. How important is code quality for the “efficiencer”?

(If you want to ask me a question for answering in a video or blog post, you can do so here).

As for the blog itself, the sparse content is more of an aberration than a trend.  I’m not shooting with do-or-die intention for a weekly cadence, but that is loosely my goal.  And I’ve decided to stop treating content creation as a kind of work, and opt to carve out a little time on Saturdays for it instead, treating it as a hobby.

So, no promises on cadence, but rest assured that if you’ve been coming here for content over the years, I have no intention of stopping the train.

Picks

• That brown dwarf reference at the beginning of the post wasn’t idle.  I’d just read a cool article about new exoplanets, where I learned about something called a “Cold Neptune.”  If you’re similarly way-too-fascinated by space, you might enjoy this as well.
• My wife and I listened to an audiobook called “Devil in the White City” (affiliate link) during our travels over the holiday season.  It’s the true story of a bunch of architects, a serial killer, and various other miscellaneous players that made the run up to the 1893 World’s Fair surprisingly fascinating.  It’s non-fiction but reads like a page-turner fiction story.
• I recently acquired a “smart scale” from Runcobo (affiliate link).  This might not sound overly interesting, but it’s really cool if you’re into the kind of biometric data you get from a fitness tracker.  It’ll not only tell you what you weight, but also things like bone mass, water weight, metabolic rate, skeletal muscle and more.  It’s actually pretty fascinating.

The Digest

• Parasoft did a round-up post, soliciting opinions from various folks/writers about industry trends.  I got a little blurb in there, if you’re interested to read my thoughts along with others.
• For any of you that are fans of Jonathan Stark’s work and the Ditching Hourly podcast, I appeared on an episode recently.
• Here’s the last of the series of live blog posts I wrote for Hit Subscribe’s live blogging of All Day DevOps.

And, finally, here’s the round-up video.