Posts Categorized: Blogroll

The problem with calendars nowadays

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I find myself stuck to my phone nowadays — it’s a necessary evil that helps me keep on top of my work through a plethora of apps which are no longer a help but rather a necessity. There’s email, Slack, Github, Okta, Google Docs, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Zoom, SMS and the list goes on. Amongst these, […]

Experience or institutional knowledge?

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These 2 things are often confused in our industry: experience and institutional knowledge. Too often I see companies evaluating engineers based on the fact they know where to go and make changes quickly and put out fires, rather than looking at the impact long term an individual has, on the platform, on its stability, on […]

Working with senior engineers

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This is another topic that I often get asked about when I advise companies. It often comes packaged in the format “what do I need to do to attract more senior engineers?” but the core of it is the same: how do you work with senior engineers? As an engineer myself and having worked throughout […]

computer code

Polyglot or poly-framework?

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Our Universe is expanding every day — and I mean this in the sense of our “programming universe” (though the other, ad literam interpretation is true as well, since our actual physical Universe is expanding indeed). Every meetup and every website I come across advocates a new framework, a new architecture, a new language, a […]

What makes a good CTO?

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I have been a CTO myself a few times and worked for some of the greats (and learned!) so I get asked often about what are the traits of a good CTO, be it by the companies I’m advising privately and also through Endeavor mentorship sessions. If you are a co-founder looking for a CTO […]

I’m a senior engineer and I want a promotion!

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This is something that comes up often in sessions through the Endeavor network or with companies I advise so I thought it worth a blog post. Imagine a situation where you have a startup, you are in the right place and have the right skillset to scale this up, you build up your engineering team […]

How to read version number and other details from Java manifest

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One of the challenges I have seen teams struggle with nowadays is versioning their packages. One of the problems with adopting any versioning system is that typically you have to version (at least) 2 components: the binary you are releasing AND the source code, at the time you have built the software. Doing this allows […]

API World Conference 2018

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I’ve tweeted enough about this during the conference itself so you would have seen all of these images before, but if you want a “no subtitles” image-only version here it is — going through the images they actually do tell a story themselves to be fair! Many thanks to Hilton hotel San Jose for hosting […]

The eternal issue about Object.hashCode() in Java

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Have you heard of hashCode() and equals() in Java and the eternal discussions around this? And you know by now the implications of having a messed up relationship in between hashCode and equals so you make sure every time you implement a class with an equals() you have to make sure hashCode() follows suit right? […]