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Category: engineering

Exec Podcast

Exec Podcast

About a year ago, my friend Miles and I started organizing informal monthly lunches for startup engineering leaders in Boulder (contact me if you're not on the list). I'm past the point in my career where there's much upside to showing up to a random networking happy hour, and have found a recurring informal lunch with high caliber people to be a nice alternative.  These lunches have evolved into Read the article >>
Recruit A-List Engineers: What a cold recruitment message should look like

Recruit A-List Engineers: What a cold recruitment message should look like

I've written in the recent past about bad behavior by recruiters and have gotten some questions about how I would recruit engineers for my startup.  Great question, and it just so happens I have signed over 25 offer letters as a technical recruiter over the last several years.  Here's an example of how I cold LinkedIn-Message'd them a few weeks before the offer letter. [name], We're always Read the article >>
Reduce LinkedIn Spam with this Profile Headline

Reduce LinkedIn Spam with this Profile Headline

If like me, you are a software engineer, you probably also get LinkedIn recruiter spam. I don't mind getting messages from folks who have read my profile and my twitter, considered my the best fit for my talents within their clients, and crafted a message to me.  But LinkedIn messages from recruiters are not like that.  They are spray-and-pray messages dogshit from folks who haven't even read Read the article >>
How to set up streaming replication in Postgres 9.4 on Ubuntu

How to set up streaming replication in Postgres 9.4 on Ubuntu

One of my first projects at my new gig was to set up streaming replication on Postgres 9.4 database server. Replication is a handy way of mirroring data stored in postgres across several servers. It's useful for scaling reads to a database cluster (in our case, a driving force for the change was to make sure our nightly backups were not running from the master server). The first thing to do is Read the article >>
ColoradoEngineers.com Slack Team

ColoradoEngineers.com Slack Team

Following the success of the Data Science Slack Team, I am working on another experiment to bring engineers in the front-range software community together: ColoradoEngineers.com is a, free, private slack team that we will use to Kick around startup ideas. Debate the merits of different tools. Receive mentorship from other engineers. Share job and event information. There are only Read the article >>
Good Engineer / Bad Engineer

Good Engineer / Bad Engineer

Good engineers are value creation machines. They take responsibility for the outcome of a project. They see the situation holistically, rather than in silos. They speak up when they are stuck. They use maxims for guidance, whose meanings are contextual, not dogmatic. They view product quality as everyone’s responsibility, not just QAs. They do not shy away from making mistakes. They think for themselves. Read the article >>
My Software Engineering Interview Prep Checklist

My Software Engineering Interview Prep Checklist

I've put together a handy checklist for interviewees at software startups.  If you're job hunting, or may be job hunting soon, feel free to take it for a spin. Interview Prep Checklist: General Knowledge Data Structures Bit Manipulation Brain Teasers Object Oriented Design Recursion and Dynamic Programming Scalability and Memory Limits Sorting and Searching Design Patterns Testing Threads Read the article >>
In-line Logging

In-line Logging

From the handy tip department: It's really nice to have built-in in-line logging for your application. I'm often asked to debug issues in StepOut's application that would be tough to handle if I was just dropping `echo()` and `die()s` everywhere. In particular, performance issues are a pain to debug without a built-in infrastructure that can spit out performance statistics at any time. Of course Read the article >>
Startups @ Scale: Building an early warning system

Startups @ Scale: Building an early warning system

I've been thinking how much things have changed lately at Ignighter.  We're starting to get some press, a bunch of daily registrations, and a bunch more messages piping through our once-rinky dating website.  It's beginning to feel like we're not such a small startup anymore. When milestones like those pass, it really changes the way your team builds software.  These days, I'm obsessed with building Read the article >>