Showing Posts From Work
Software Development is Dead, Long Live Developers!
“If you don’t learn to code, in ten years it will be like being illiterate!” That was what someone exclaimed on a panel discussion I was on in 2013. It was a talk about bringing technology and entertainment together held in Beverly Hills and hosted by a coding bootcamp company. Two of the people on the panel were from a different bootcamp company, and then there was me, an actual technologist working in entertainment.
Read moreThe Simple Pleasures of a Mobile Office Whiteboard
I’ve built a lot of stuff for my home office over the last few years of working from home, but my current favorite is something so simple: A custom rolling whiteboard A couple of weeks ago I gave myself a Saturday challenge to take my existing old whiteboard and build a rolling stand for it only with materials I had in my workshop.
Read moreI’m Leaving my Role at Studio71
Back in October, after 11 years at the company, I made the decision to leave my full-time CTO role at Studio71. I came to Studio71, then called The Collective (and later Collective Digital Studio), because I wanted to build something big. I love building things, and by things I mean all the things: software, teams, culture, process, business, revenue, arcade cabinets…I’d love to learn how to weld, but I digress.
Read moreA Decade of Clojure at Studio71
What is Clojure and why did it fit for Studio71? Clojure is a programming language (a dialect of Lisp) that excels at concurrency and data processing. Clojure runs on top of Java so it’s runs in all of the places Java runs and can use all of the Java libraries already out there (hello, Google and AWS libraries!
Read moreWhy Are Technical Interviews Still So Bad?!
Python for Engineers has a great post on how terrible technical interviews are for people on both sides of the table. There is this idiotic myth online that the majority of programmers cannot program. That everyone else looking for a job is an idiot, and our job is to expose them, to teach them a lesson, to humiliate them till they quit.
Read moreShopify Cancels All Recurring Meetings with Over Two People
If you were wondering what the latest thing that a CEO thought up in his shower the size of a studio apartment that has one of those terrible “rain” shower heads and is now shoving it down his employee’s throats is… As employees return from holiday break, the Canadian e-commerce firm said it’s conducting a “calendar purge,” removing all recurring meetings with more than two people “in perpetuity,” while reupping a rule that no meetings at all can be held on Wednesdays.
Read moreThe Infosec Cold Call
I get asked occasionally about ways to improve corporate information security or what kinds of things get easily missed, and while I’m no expert, and there are an endless number of little things you can miss these days, there’s one way I rarely hear mentioned and I like to remind technical leadership about:
Read moreContext Powers Brand Safety at Studio71
Have you heard about the brand safety concerns on YouTube? Maybe you’ve heard it described as the “Adpocalypse”? Even if you haven’t caught wind of the madness over the last 12 months, surely you understand that anything mixed with “apocalypse” isn’t a good thing. As is common in “whatever-pocalypse” situations there was a fair bit of freak out, but Studio71 went to work!
Read moreNot So Unlimited Vacation Policy
I was catching up on Marco Arment’s writing (marco.org) recently and his link from December 14th caught my eye. Arment links to a piece talking about the lie that is the common startup benefit of “unlimited” vacation days (From Open (Unlimited) to Minimum Vacation Policy). It’s a good piece and certinaly worth a read but Arment’s comments are what specifically caught my eye:
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