Archives
Since October 17, 2010, I’ve written 99619 words on software, product development, and professional growth. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading at least some of those words. My favorite posts are bolded below.
2020
2019
2018
- Creative Selection: How Apple builds products with demos, taste, and leverage
- The trouble with timestamps
- This committee is a pointless time suck
-
Building a 
Fuzzy 
Emoji 
Finder 
- Evaluating project opportunities
2017
- How to start a peer group
- Algorithms to Live By (Book Writeup)
- Software ate the world
- The Undoing Project (Book Writeup)
- Sam Walton: Made in America (Book Writeup)
- How much does 'crunch time' hurt team morale?
- A data-driven approach to finding toxic meetings
2016
- Closing Down a Product, Gracefully
- Adventures in Content Marketing
- Podcast Roundup IV
- A Live Chat Experiment
- How I Dunning-Kruger'd Marketing
- The Only Rule Is It Has to Work (Book Writeup)
- Small wins: printers and rubies and sales calls
- Hacking my office Indy 500 pool: exploiting arbitrage in an inefficient market
- Writing a Postmortem
- Compounding technical debt
- Tracking down bugs without QA
- Getting reacquainted with our customers
- Sprint (Book Writeup)
- The First Winter
- Internal tools should be sold or killed
2015
- Code Neutral
- Testing Behavior vs Implementation
- Juking the Stats
- The Soul of a New Machine (Book Writeup)
- The Soul of a Chef (Book Writeup)
- The Leprechauns of Software Engineering (Book Writeup)
- What is the point of Optionals?
2014
- How I Curate the IndyHackers' Newsletter
- Think Like a Chef (Book Writeup)
- Flash Boys (Book Writeup)
- The Senior Software Engineer (Book Writeup)
- Creativity, Inc. (Book Writeup)
- Everything is Bullshit (Book Writeup)
- The Game (Book Writeup)
- Think Like A Freak (Book Writeup)
- Personal Meditations on Software
- The E-Myth Revisited (Book Writeup)
- Extracting Form Models in Android
- There is more to it than code
- Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design (Book Writeup)
- Two Lines of Code: An Open Source Tale
- Durable Android REST Clients
- One Day Further
- Observations and Practices of a Tech Lead
- Integration Testing against REST APIs in Android
- My Year in Review: 2013
2013
- Reliable API testing for Android with Retrofit and Mockito
- Responsive Layouts in Android without Copy/Paste
- Some tools I like
- How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (Book Writeup)
- How Buildings Learn (and why software is no different)
- When in doubt, do a Spike
- How not to validate email addresses
- Crappy emails make me sad
- The Making of a Chef (Book Writeup)
- "Have It Your Way" Software
- How to Practice Code Reviews
- Do things, write about it
- Engineering a First Run Experience
- Interview to Implementation: Horizon Report
- How to make writing tests less painful
- Don't Email Me at 2am
- On Becoming T-Shaped
- Step-by-Step UX Improvement: Screenshot Upload
- More Tales in Bad Restaurant UX
- Half-Baked Thoughts on Ruby Web Architecture
- Email as the Interface
- Getting Traction for your Open Source Project
- Step-by-Step UX Improvement: Project Screenshots
- Myers-Briggs for Programming Styles
- The Motivation Hacker (Book Writeup)
- Confident Ruby (Book Writeup)
- So Good They Can't Ignore You (Book Writeup)
- Microinteractions (Book Writeup)
- Crush It (Book Writeup)
- The First 20 Hours (Book Writeup)
- Delightful UX: Medium's Time to Read
- Jekyll 201: Beyond Hello World
- The Intern & New Hire Summer Reading List
- The 30 Second Standup
- You (yes you!) can make delightful products
- Expanding and Contracting
- How to Not Quit
- Changing Plans
- Are Your Lights On? (Book Writeup)
- More Complicated Than It Needs To Be
- Too Much Information
- Cross-Pollinate
- Evaluating Technical Arguments
- Worst. Bug. Ever.
- Confident Refactoring
- My Year in Review: 2012
2012
- Habit Ramp Up
- Personal Time Capsule
- Motion is not Progress
- The Optimistic Programmer
- Code Reviews: Good idea, bad idea?
- Complications (Book Writeup)
- I Don't Have Time
- How Children Succeed (Book Writeup)
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Book Writeup)
- Better: A Surgeon's Notes On Performance (Book Writeup)
- A Short History of Nearly Everything (Book Writeup)
- New Coke User Experience
- Learned Optimism (Book Writeup)
- Move your feet
- The Personal MBA (Book Writeup)
- Technical Blogging (Book Writeup)
- Objects on Rails (Book Writeup)
- Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec (Book Writeup)
- There's Always a Duck (Book Writeup)
- Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided By Tests (Book Writeup)
- The Cucumber Book (Book Writeup)
- A Dangerous Obsession with Primitives
- Lightning Talk: Anatomy of a Weekend Project
- What I've Learned From Failure (Book Writeup)
- The Wisdom of Crowds (Book Writeup)
- Test First as System 2 Thinking
- Lightning Talk: Team-based Git Workflow (that doesn't suck)
- What's in my Side Project Queue?
- Repeating Background Textures in Android
- Let's build a Ruby mocking framework! Sorta...kinda?
- Driving Technical Change (Book Writeup)
- Redis: Swiss Army Knife - Indy Software Artisans
- Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative (Book Writeup)
2011
- My Year in Review: 2011
- Global Day of Code Retreat Recap
- What's on your Learning List?
- The Art of Readable Code (Book Writeup)
- Agile Retrospectives (Book Writeup)
- Building an SEP API - Brownbag
- Overcoming Momentum
- Weapon of Choice
- Over/Under: I'm a Serial Over Committer
- Get Better
- Javascript Day: Node + Visualization Libraries - Indy ALT.NET
- Web Development Kata - Tweet Viewer
- The Applebee's of Software Development
- SEP Blog Off
- Intrapreneurship: Applying the Lean Startup to building internal tools
- Podcast Roundup III
- Heedful Programming - Brownbag
- My take on interviewing and the hiring process
- SDC Chicago Talk Takeaways
- Dive into Node.js - Brownbag
- Update on Lanyon + Cross-domain AJAX POSTs with CORS
- Ship It! (Book Writeup)
- Making a commit with the Github API
- Lessons Learned from SEP's Internal Startup Weekend
- Digging around the Github v3 API
- Little Bets (Book Writeup)
- Inspired (Book Writeup)
- Startup Weekend Tip & Tricks
- Writing with Markdown - Indy ALT.NET
- Personal Kanban (Book Writeup)
- Startups Open Sourced (Book Writeup)
- Podcast Roundup II
- Moonwalking with Einstein (Book Writeup)
- NoSQL Rundown - Brownbag
- Managing Python libraries across git projects
- How HackerNews ruined my morning
2010
- Envisioning Information (Book Writeup)
- Weekly Noise 4 Recap - Glorified Screensaver - Post Mortem
- Weekly Noise 3 Recap/Weekly Noise 4 - Hitting a roadblock
- Weekly Noise 3 - "So it's like a screensaver..." (Part II)
- Weekly Noise 2 Recap - alert("It's working!");
- Building a Javascript web app, or sipping the node.js koolaid
- More Joel on Software (Book Writeup)
- Weekly Noise 2 - "So it's like a screensaver..."
- Weekly Noise - Week 1 Recap
- Podcast Roundup
- Getting Real (Book Writeup)
- Hackers & Painters (Book Writeup)
- Pro Git (Book Writeup)
- Apprenticeship Patterns (Book Writeup)
- Pragmatic Programmer (Book Writeup)
- Weekly Noise - Week 1
- Hello world