There’s a persistent pattern around promotions in the software industry. It goes something like this: a software engineer begins their career, learns a lot over a couple years, and then thinks “How do I get promoted?” …

In medium-to-large-sized companies, there is a term of art to denote a set of open requisitions for hire or current full-time employees on a team, and that term is “headcount.” …

I enjoyed this thoughtful post from Brian on team communication and decision making. It’s true that some teams will jump from tool to tool for project management without great reasons or a firm understanding of what their process challenges are. …

The companies with the best time-off policies understand that ample time off for workers isn’t a luxury granted from on high, but a reflection of a civilized society, a benefit ultimately reaped by the business, and respectful to humans who work to build and live a life apart from work. …

As a developer, I often need to make use of API documentation to understand how to use a service on which I want to depend. Getting started from scratch is always the biggest challenge and use of time, so I greatly appreciate those APIs that are very well-documented. …

In the creation of products, some people are more concerned with quality than others. Moreover, among those who do care, different people have different notions of what “quality” means. There are, at least in software development, a few broadly known admonishments and maxims regarding quality in production. There are those…

There’s a common problem in the software industry, especially among companies that have survived rapid growth spurts: the best software engineers have nowhere to go but up. Up the management chain, that is—away from the code and the details, into the land of meetings, roadmaps, architecture and cost planning. It…