A Story About Hiring – a Manager’s Struggle to Do It All
In today’s market, technical leaders sometimes have two (if not more) full-time jobs. They must manage their teams, keep projects on track, and maintain all other day-to-day responsibilities. They also must attract, hire, and recruit top talent. Making these strategic...
So You’re Moving to the Silicon Forest?
If you’re moving to Portland, you might be wondering which neighborhood to live in. You should first know the genius of the city’s layout, which is split into 4 primary areas: NW, NE, SW, and SE. They are divided by the Willamette River (going north and south) and...
Tips for Implementing Agile the Right Way
There’s lots of buzz about agile — as well as plenty of misconceptions about what agile is and isn’t. Agile offers a variety of benefits, from a better final product to improved collaboration, which has led many organizations to adopt an agile approach. But seeing...
Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing
Every so often, software development goes through major disruptive changes. The introduction of object-oriented programming was a major paradigm shift in the way a computer programmer breaks down project requirements into distinct islands of code referred to as...
Why Enterprise Programming Is So Challenging
If you backed me into a corner and asked me what’s the toughest and most challenging kind of software development I’ve ever experienced, I’d have to say hands down, it’s the world of enterprise software development. To be clear, enterprise development is all about...
How a Developer Measures Success
How should a software developer measure their success? When I was younger and starting out in my professional software development career, I used to think it was how much code I sling. Like Clint Eastwood in “A Fistful of Dollars”, I liked to pretend I was a...
How Developers Level Up
I’ve been a video game nut ever since I was a kid. I especially loved those Dungeons & Dragons style role playing fantasy games where you played a lone hero out to save the world from unspeakable evils. Every role playing game, whether it’s paper based or computer...
The “I’m Not Technical” Cop Out
There’s something I’ve been observing recently about my job that’s really been puzzling me lately. Maybe puzzling is a little bit too weak. More like disturbing. I work as a software developer for a software as a service company. It’s basically their primary bread and...
The 99 Cent App Problem
“TANSTAFL – There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” – Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” Whenever I get in the mood to purchase new apps for my iPhone, I usually like to read the user reviews first, to get an idea of what other people...
My Ideal Work Computer
If it didn’t look kind of weird and creepy as a man in his mid forties, to head down to my local shopping mall during Christmas and sit on mall Santa’s lap to ask what I wanted for Christmas, you know what I would ask old St. Nick? A mobile computer. Yes, I know, I...