Dec 312019
 

Much ado has been made about political advertising on sites like Twitter and Facebook since they announced their general policies around the ads, such as Jeff Jarvis’s take Unpopular Decisions and Ben Thompson’s Tech and Liberty. It’s easy to make this about the companies and the applications they offer, and to complain about how they’re ruining everything, but that strikes me as blaming online applications for the behavior of people offline. It also shifts responsibility for some of the problems onto targets of convenience regardless of responsibility.

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 Posted by at 11:45 AM
Nov 302019
 

Part of having mature infrastructure management is treating infrastructure as code. If your infrastructure is on a public cloud, Terraform is a good choice for that “code.” It’s platform-agnostic (at least as agnostic as you’re going to get), easy to learn, and easy to run. If you’re coming from something platform-specific, like AWS’s CloudFormation, you’ll probably feel right at home with Terraform in short order.

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 Posted by at 10:19 PM
Sep 302019
 

A couple of months ago, developers on Twitter started spamming jokes or frustrations about the mythical “10X engineer” in response to this tweet by a startup investor from India. Thankfully, outside of this guy’s original tweet thread, nobody else was buying the “10X engineer” nonsense. Unfortunately, the fact that this guy tweeted it in the first place means there’s too many people out there laboring under a delusion that desperately need to be set straight.

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 Posted by at 11:45 AM
Aug 312019
 

One of the benefits of using Javascript frameworks like React or Vue is that you can build and export your own custom components. This lets other teams in your organization or even external developers build front-ends that have a consistent look and feel across the board as well as follow any style or branding guide you have. That’s great, but think about the components you’re putting out there for developers to use. Are you putting out the bare minimum or are you shipping front-end tools that speed development up and make people’s lives easier (you know, the whole point of shipping front-end components like this)?

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 Posted by at 3:45 PM
Jul 312019
 

Do any research into current front-end development, and you’ll hit React pretty quickly. As far as modern Javascript frameworks go, React is probably the standard Javascript framework used by startups and other companies that haven’t already heavily invested in another front-end framework. While React does a decent job of packaging up HTML and Javascript into reusable components, there’s been some design decisions around handling application state in React, namely by using a framework called Redux, that make developing applications harder than it has to be, and make it worth your while to look for other options before you start falling into its rabbit hole too.

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 Posted by at 11:48 PM
May 312019
 

I’m curious how many people identify with this scenario – to check all of your emails you have flip between at least 2 accounts, maybe even 3. And that’s just emails. There’s also calendars – again 2 of them, maybe 3 if you have a family. Most of us have multiple “identities,” each with basic services associated with them, like email, calendars, sometimes phones and/or some form of instant messaging. It’s the type of thing that’s been done by so many people in so many places that it’s ingrained in us as “normal,” but the more I think about it, the less sense it makes.

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 Posted by at 11:45 AM
Apr 302019
 

I’ve been developing in Java since late 2009. It’s a good language, but I’m starting to wonder what kind of future it has. I’ve been using Java 8 since shortly after it came out, even though Java is currently on version 11. Java’s obviously still being developed, so why not move forward? A big part isn’t the infamous module system that launched in Java 9, and broke a lot of stuff. Part of it is the fact that Java is owned and controlled a by a company that seems more interested in rent-seeking off oa Java than doing anything innovative with it.

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 Posted by at 11:45 AM
Mar 312019
 

Software is written to solve a problem. Sometimes, it’s more than one problem, but you get the idea. Being someone who both uses and writes software, I’ve found the best software out there doesn’t just solve a problem, but was written with a clear and definitive opinion about how that problem should be solved. That’s not by accident or coincidence, it’s very much causal.

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 Posted by at 11:54 PM
Feb 282019
 

I’ve worked for *aaS companies for about the last 7 years. Monthly software subscriptions literally pay my mortgage, so I get the benefits of building businesses around predictable monthly payments. But that being said, not every online business lends itself to being subscription-based, and there’s a few companies out there that need to stop.

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 Posted by at 12:47 PM