Sabbatical week one is complete, and I’m finally finding some time to blog about it! I had a pretty active week. It started with hurricane preparations as Dorian burled toward Florida, however in the end we suffered a very light glancing blow. In short, we got off easy. The Bahamas did not get so lucky, however, and got pretty messed up. I’d love for you to take a moment to donate to their recovery here: https://www.| David Haney
One of the most amazing perks of working at Stack Overflow is the sabbatical. After 5 years of FT employment, you are entitled to 20 paid days off (outside of normal vacation) that you can spend however you please. My sabbatical officially begins on Tuesday (as Monday is a holiday). Practically speaking, I am out from Aug 31 - Sept 30, returning to work Oct 1st. This is an amazing opportunity and benefit, and I can’t thank Stack Overflow enough for how well they treat employees.| David Haney
A few weeks back I wrote this tweet: I did a presentation / speaking thing last week that got me thinking: would it be useful to blog about how to build a resume as someone new to tech, from the perspective of a hiring manager? I might whip that up today or tomorrow if people like the idea. — David Haney hachyderm.io/@haney (@haneytron) July 9, 2018 43 likes later, it’s clear to me that this topic is in-demand.| David Haney
This post is for those of you who hire developers, and also junior developers who want to be hired. Let’s talk about how developers are just like individual stocks in the stock market. Time for a little role-playing: you’re now a stock market investor. As a financial advisor, your company has given you $2,000,000 USD to invest in the stock market. It’s made very clear that the future of the company depends on the return on investment (herein called ROI) – “gains” – that your inv...| David Haney
In case you missed the big news in the industry this week, a GitLab employee accidentally deleted a ton of production data and took their platform down for hours. It was only when everything was on fire and they were in deep trouble that they turned to their backup systems… only to find that none of them actually worked. Backup Prod Data Regularly Not exactly a groundbreaking statement, right? Everybody knows this.| David Haney
I was working on my fireplace this past weekend. Specifically I had just finished ripping down the old surface to the red brick, and then preparing the brick surface with a layer of thinset for tiling. I spent all of Saturday cutting tiles and then placing them on the fireplace surround and hearth. Even with help it took 11 hours to do, and about 8 hours of it was measuring and cutting tiles.| David Haney
Today an article was brought to my attention. One that, at the time of writing this post, had hit the front page of various sites (including Hacker News) and had been shared over 2,600 times. The article is On Secretly Terrible Engineers, which is a criticism of the tech industry and the mentality which it holds towards hiring both new and experienced developers/engineers. Spoiler: I strongly disagree with most of this article.| David Haney
The Problem I think that most devs would agree when I state that the definition of success in the corporate world of development places less emphasis on “good” code and more emphasis on “working” code. Working code is code that can be released to production on or before the deadline, regardless of performance or even bugs in most cases. As a developer, you ultimately feel as if you’ve failed when you toil for nights on end to meet steep deadlines and churn out crappy code.| David Haney