Should a company’s tech stack influence your job hunt? If you’ve looked up Lever as a prospective employee, you may have discovered a couple of things: It’s a great company with rave reviews on Glassdoor, InHerSight and other job platforms It’s a mature startup with lots of technical roles to…

Sometimes pairing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — I’ve recently changed my thinking around “programming dogmas” — the things we do because we believe they’re best practice — because we’ve been told they are, even when our own experience does not back that up. …

#9 Want to build a diverse team? Make sure the hiring committee is diverse — A little while ago, a close friend of mine emailed me to ask for my opinion on my experience of hiring and being hired as a woman for a senior software engineering role. Having just gone through an epic job hunt in the hopes of relocating to Canada, I had…

These days it’s often hard to decide what to call yourself when you write code for a living. Some prefer just “coder”, “developer” or “programmer”, but usually (especially if you want to up your salary bracket), you would choose to be referred to as a “software engineer”. But where does…

It would be difficult to find someone who has contributed more to the field of computer science than Admiral Grace Hopper. When America joined the second world war, Grace couldn’t face the idea of working as a teacher when the country needed her rare skills. She signed up to become…

In 1945 one of the world’s first programmable, electronic general-purpose computers, the ENIAC, was unveiled. However, there was one small problem — there was no one to program it. In theory, the computer could be used to solve any problem with its vacuum tubes, function tables and accumulators. However, the…

During WWII German U-boats could easily block radio transmissions between warships and torpedoes. The way that their submarines would “jam” the signals was to intercept a certain radio frequency and fill the channel with noise. Once the signal was lost, the torpedo would go off course and miss its target. …

Charles Babbage was considered something of a “Da Vinci man” and like many other Victorian scholars was a prolific inventor. His inventions ranged from the ophthalmoscope, used for eye exams, to the “cow catcher” — a bar that is placed on the front of trains to clear obstacles. But he…

Conventional wisdom says that a “good” function should never have more than one return. This is usually recommended due to the chance of missing one of the return points, and getting confused about the value the function could return. …