Three Levels of Developer Productivity

If you work on developer productivity, you sit in an unique spot. You are often given a broad mandate — “make the engineers more productive”-and typically little guidance on what the word ‘productive’ means. (Spoiler: There’s no one right answer here.)

Nolan Caudill

May 14, 2015

Rules over Safety

Last year, MUNI removed a few seats from the front of its standard electric buses by permanently locking them upright. They did this due to safety reasons: “these seats do not have a barrier in front of them to protect a person from falling in the event of a sudden stop or collision.” (link)

Nolan Caudill

Jun 27, 2014

Hello, Slack

Two weeks ago, I started at Tiny Speck as their engineering manager, working on Slack. Slack is getting bigger in almost every way that matters and I’m excited about getting to take part in it.

So what does taking this particular role at this particular company mean to me? It…

Nolan Caudill

Dec 31, 2013

A Tahoe Trip

Meghan and I got back from Lake Tahoe this afternoon. We shared a house in Incline Village, Nevada with her parents and three brothers who had flown out from Tennessee. It was a relaxing week of eating, drinking, skiing, reading, and catching up with the in-laws.

Nolan Caudill

Jul 20, 2013

A Train Adventure in Italy

A couple of months ago, my wife and I went on a two week vacation to Europe for our 5th wedding anniversary, splitting our time between Paris, Rome, and Cinque Terre. The first leg of our trip was in Paris where we spent a few days exploring the city. From there the plan was to…

Nolan Caudill

Jun 14, 2013

Tiny Tiny RSS, a Google Reader Replacement

Google Reader is being discontinued on June 30th. This is probably the web application I’ve used the most and for the longest so I was a little bummed when they made the announcement. I immediately started looking for its replacement.

Nolan Caudill

Apr 13, 2013

How Secure is my Dropbox?

The answer to this is: Secure as any other “private” content uploaded to the Internet, which is “not very.”

Dropbox is a widely-used service that lets you keep a specific directory in sync across many computers. Copy a file into the Dropbox folder on your…

Nolan Caudill

Mar 30, 2013

Afternoon Chats with the Navy

This morning, I read Claire Vaye Watkins’ essay The Ivy League Was Another Planet about the college application process for an American rural high schooler. Her story was nearly identical to my experience.

Nolan Caudill

Mar 29, 2013

FlickrTrickle

This is a little tool that I wrote a couple of years ago that I think a handful of people use occasionally. To keep up with my philosophy of “if it can be open sourced, it should be open sourced,” combined with asking for people’s read-and-write privileges to their Flickr accounts without showing the…

Nolan Caudill

Dec 17, 2012

Until a few months ago, my Flickr account was still using the same 6-letter password that Yahoo automatically assigned to me in the late 1990s. Most of my other accounts were using a variation of this password, with a dumb algorithm that used pieces of the site’s URL with some numbers attached. None of this was good.