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I seek people who value quality as its own reward. I appreciate those who think that a job well done is not just “nice to have” but a mark of honesty, integrity and the producer’s self-worth. Behind every published word, every implemented design and every piece of running code, there is a body of knowledge, [...]

A lot of people want to get an awesome job, but most of the advice out there is geared toward joining corporate bureaucracies and saving some repressed human resources manager from a frightful view of reality. Résumé templates, guidance counselors and the corporate ladder have conspired to make your career as boring and reproducible as [...]

Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence. —Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., “The Mythical Man-Month” In the old model, large companies built large pieces of software and had to support nearly every user and their myriad edge cases and behaviors. This [...]

Send email in plain text – not “formatted” or HTML. Your font is hideous and your gratuitous spacing is offensive. Don’t even get me started on background images. Convey your message with punctuation, letters, words and sentences. If something is *really important* you can use asterisks, like that. Keep it short and to the point [...]

Great software development is a creative discipline that requires skillful individuals, effective organization and undying passion from all who are involved. There are many theories about developer productivity, engineering management and company organization, but few that make an honest attempt to reconcile all of these factors and present an approach that both builds from proven [...]

The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants them to do, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. Theodore Roosevelt An effective leader is not an autocrat. The best leaders who build the most support and achieve the most [...]

Your screeching smoke detector wakes you up and you smell smoke. Adrenaline is pumped throughout your system and you’re on your feet at the doorway, staring at a hazy room with flames in the background. What are you doing to make this situation better? You’re at a family gathering during the holidays. Everyone is having [...]

Somehow it still isn’t understood that programmers don’t produce their best work during any specific set of hours or only when they are in the office. Programming is an activity cognitively closer to philosophizing than it is to elementary math or physics. The best work doesn’t get done between 9am and lunch, with Sue from [...]

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

-John W. Gardner

Quality is important in plumbing, philosophy, and coding all the same…

When starting a tech business it’s traditional to think that you must have representatives from each of the various roles present at the beginning: the business person, the tech person, the marketing person, etc. There is a strong cult of opinion on what it takes to create a successful business and most of that opinion [...]