You must be this tall to ride the Elastic Beanstalk
Elastic Beanstalk seems like it’s meant to allow a startup to easily deploy Web sites using the most common Web frameworks, and scale those sites gracefully with an integrated AWS scaling group. I’m...
View ArticleHow I hire engineers for startups
I went looking for articles on how to interview programmers/engineers for startups. I didn't like much of what I found (I did like Elad Blog's take), and none of them addressed engineering skills and...
View ArticleStreets are safer than ever
I recently looked up some data in response to a sad person thinking that "our streets" (the writer was writing from New York, but the perception is widespread) are less safe for kids than they were in...
View ArticleDear applicant
I wrote up a series of overly honest responses to job applicants a few years ago. Didn't send them, of course, it was purely therapeutic writing. Now that the job posting itself is stale and I don't...
View ArticleHTTP error responses in APIs
I've seen a bunch of mis-use of HTTP status responses in HTTP/JSON or HTTP/XML APIs. It's not merely a matter of taste when interoperability can suffer, as when status responses are used by...
View ArticleManagement of Risk in Software Testing
I read a rather old book called "Technological Risk" while working on startup software test plans, and this is making me think of the tradeoffs in a very abstract manner.In the same way that there's a...
View ArticleTrello for agile development
I've now observed a few development teams using Trello to manage their work. Trello feels great to use and it seems to promote creativity and participation, which is also great. There's some things...
View ArticleVoting, consensus, and the tyranny of structurelessness
I am in a new organization with growing pains. We all want to work together but nobody knows how to make decisions in this organization. The funny and frustrating thing is that everybody is mature,...
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