All estimates are still lies

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

- Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

A note about hiring junior developers

From the LRUG mailing list:

Seems strange that there’s so much talk about skills shortages and yet
not many companies seem prepared to train their own. *shrug*

HBS Internal: Brexit Strategy

This is our internal memo about Brexit, the effect it has had on our business and what we’re intending to do about it. It’s not intended for public consumption, but someone asked us to share it and there’s nothing highly sensitive in it, so I’ve posted it here.

The programmer career middle-game

You’re a programmer about ten years into your career. You’ve worked on countless projects, watched teams do all the wrong things, watched teams do all the right things, and have been somewhere in middle most of the time. You still like making things, but are weary of…

Questions to ask in your developer job interview

Ask better questions, get more info about the job, make better decisions.

In job interviews, there comes a point when the interviewer asks you for questions. Most…

HBS Company Reading List

This is a reading list for permanent employees of Happy Bear Software. You can expense the purchases of all of these books.

Required reading

As commander in chief of this company you are hearby ordered to purchase (and…

HBS Relational databases topic guide

Working with relational databases is part of the core skill set for full-stack developers at Happy Bear Software. It’s a topic that new developers get to last because it’s seen as “back-end” and perhaps more difficult than front-end development. While it may…

Make your development team happy with better communication

Defining Requirements

You’ve defined the project goals in broad strokes and are talking to someone that can build your web application. The next step is to plan the first stages of the project so that you can start shipping software.