As an aspiring guitarist, I’ve noticed that music, like other forms of creative art, painting, drawing, or design, require high amounts of passion, enthusiasm, and resolve. More and more, I’ve found the same about development — developers do their best work when they are working on something that they are personally passionate about. Software engineering is a fundamentally creative practice — Read the article >>
If you’re anything like me, you get a knot in your stomach in the morning when you check your inbox. Emails are imposing. Sometimes, they come with an expectation of response. Often, there is a task to be completed before I can give that response. To add insult to injury, my inbox is a bottomless jumbled mess of action items that are different priorities. It represents a footrace towards Read the article >>
I’m a classically trained programmer. That means that in school, they taught me C++, Java, Lisp, and a handful of other techie stuff. There was a class which included ‘the lifecycle of applications’, but, beyond that, I’ve never been really trained in any of the softer skills associated with software engineering. One of the things that I’ve learned in the past year is the importance of dialogue Read the article >>
A few days ago, I was taking a break from hacking to get some coffee downstairs. StepOut’s offices are on the 4th floor, so I press the ‘down’ button, enter the elevator, and take out my iPhone. One tweet, 25 seconds later, and I’m downstairs. Cross the street. Light’s red. Take out phone, scroll more tweets. There’s a line at Starbucks. Check Email. Still waiting in line — Better Read the article >>
Your machine is a tool. A really powerful tool. You dropped hundreds, probably thousands of dollars on it. You spend more than a few hours a week with it, you owe it to yourself to learn to use it right. Try these 6 underrated OSX Apps: Skitch (free) makes it easy to share screenshots. Divvy (free to try, $14 after) makes window management a breeze. Dropbox (free) makes file sync Read the article >>
When we first started StepOut, I used to get really stressed out by the dissonant signals that come from the day-to-day of running a web startup. There’s just so much shit that can go wrong when you’re shooting to build a $100mm+ company. Lately, I’ve come to view dissonance as part of the process. You can’t scale a company without it. It’s kind of like in music when the composer creates Read the article >>
This weekend I went through my first zen retreat. My interest in meditation has ebbed and flowed over the past several years. The scientific evidence is piling up – Meditation increases mental clarity, healthy sense of self, critical thinking, decreases depression, and my personal experience seems to comport — it increases overall mental well-being. As an engineer, my mind is often spinning Read the article >>
Yesterday, on July 28th, 2012, Sergey Brin gave a demo of Google Glass at the Google I/O conference. He announced that the Google Glass for Developers would be available in early 2013. The finalized version of the Google Glass, the one for consumers, will be not released until 2014, at the earliest. The google glass release date is still unannounced. The technology behind this product, Read the article >>
Steve Jobs would practice Management By Walking Around. It’s somewhat ironic that the once-a-smelly-hippy turned CEO of Apple with no business school experience, and an attitude of anathema to traditional management school, would practice such a commonly-espoused management technique. Peer coding at StepOut. It’s simple but powerful technique – just get up from your desk, walk around, roll up your Read the article >>
Foremost, stop yourself from distractions. Study your change request, first, as a user of your product. Do not forget that before you were an engineer, you were a user. Read and re-read the objectives and their supporting data, let them marinate with your conception of your product. Open your browser, type in your products URL & immerse yourself, but only with your user mind. Understand the Read the article >>