Traveling
I am speaking at Devoxx Morocco in October, the first time I'll travel to Africa. When I spoke at Devoxx UK earlier this spring, my wife came with, but she's…
Me, A Conference Speaker? Yes, you!
I have been in your shoes: it is very intimidating to get in front of strangers and speak about your passion: technical topics where others are stronger; opinions that are…
Performance Reviews Are A Waste of Time
https://flic.kr/p/bFBKLV At least weekly I am asked for feedback or thoughts on a recent commercial interaction. Most obvious for one-time transactions with a company rendering services, e.g. lawn service, gutter…
Probing Questions For Your Interview
I've worked for many organizations of different types during my long, perhaps not-so-illustrious professional career: software and business shops; Fortune 500 and VC-funded startups; in retail, financial, healthcare, hardware; bleeding-edge…
Graph Databases and Baseball
In my opinion, stating that baseball remains America's Pastime in 2023 is a tough argument to make, as it often is as the third-most popular sport in the United States.…
It’s Elementary Privacy, Watson!
In today's (mostly) digital world, maintaining data privacy and data security should be an ongoing discussion in all businesses, especially those developing applications, both internal business shops and software shops…
Non-Traditional Project Planning
Most methodology discussions today start and end with how Agile is superior to Waterfall in software engineering; in reality, many other methodologies exist, each with its own pros and cons.…
Dependent Feature Flags
Recently I was given the task refactoring and reimplementing the service which determines the users' authorizations within our SaaS application. The major challenge was to do the work without anyone…
Software Shops and Name Recognition
Many engineers envision working for major technology companies: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Amazon, Atlassian, EBay, JetBrains, Meta (Facebook), Redhat, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce. Sure, you'll be a small fish in a…
Personalized Code Searches using OpenGrok
Many organizations implement a full-feature code search/intelligence tool - e.g., SourceGraph or Atlassian Fisheye - allowing engineers to search the enterprise code base. Other orgs just use the native search of the hosted version…