I’ve been involved in hiring software developers for over a decade. I’ve seen which skills matter in building a successful career, and which ones don’t. And I’ve seen how the software industry over-focuses on too many tactical, fleeting skills, and fails to emphasize the skills that actually matter. What follows…

This is the final article in a series, Async Superpowers: State Machines, geared for helping you understand how to easily build and test¹ UIs that have asynchronous things going on. The first article in the series is here. Here in this last article, I’d like to spend some time giving…

This is the third in an four-part series that will help you easily write and test UIs that do asynchronous stuff. Recap In the previous two articles, we learned about how to model real-world computing problems with a state machine. We played with parsing strings, controlling a rollercoaster, and modeling a…

This is the second in a four-part series that will help you easily write and test UIs that do asynchronous stuff. (Heads up: I’ll be doing pseudocode examples in Typescript and React. …

It seems that every UI in existence has to deal with doing something asynchronous. If you don’t know what that means, think back to every time you’ve seen one of these: Any time you see a “spinner” like the above, it’s probably an indication that some asynchronous stuff is happening…

In building an app for one of my clients, my colleague and I stumbled across an interesting programming problem. I’ve rarely been happy with “time picker” widgets for the desktop, so we settled on just simple text entry. Type in “11:30” and it will interpret that as 11:30am. Type in…

I continue to encounter highly-opinionated discussions about how to divide some problem space into microservices. I’ve seen multiple assertions that there is A Right Way™ to do this. (*sigh*) We need to talk. First, y’all, let’s get this thing right out into the open. You’ve got to have high technical…

I recently went through a miserable bout of tech support nonsense with my cable internet provider, Cox. Right around Friday, February 5, I started seeing my internet connectivity drop completely for spurts of up to 2 or 3 minutes. This affected my laptop, our phones, our tablets, our TV streaming…

I recently had a friend reach out to me asking for my thoughts about some questions about doing business in the software industry: How do I explain how software development really works to CEOs and CFOs? How do you explain what’s wrong and course correct when C-levels are frustrated with…