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
Well I failed badly in my mission to blog every week of 2017. I guess life and stuff just got in the way in the end. I’ll try to be more consistent in the second half of 2018. Anyway, I bring some news: I have a new blog engine, and we are hiring at Stack Overflow! New blog engine I was previously using WordPress but had many issues and concerns with it.| 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 part 2 of my series on dev team interactions, I’d like to talk about conducting good code reviews. Most dev teams will find themselves in a situation where code reviews are necessary, and in my experience many do them very poorly. I’ve even worked in companies that had such a negative code review culture that people left the review sessions upset, even considering quitting. With a few easy adjustments, you can quickly learn to conduct excellent and positive code reviews with your team.| David Haney
As a developer working for a company, you probably work on a team. The interactions on these teams are sometimes pleasant, and other times hostile. What’s interesting to me is that a lot of the time, a hostile interaction could have been a pleasant one if only approached differently. Hostile teams are created by the actions of the people on them, not by the situations they encounter. One such hostile action is blame.| David Haney
Well, I’ve utterly failed to blog at regular intervals, writing only three posts in 2016. Ouch. To be fair, one of those posts is insanely famous (the one about NPM and left-pad.js), but still, I’ve really let my readers – and myself – down. So, I resolve to write a blog post every single week of 2017, starting today. This will probably mean that I write slightly shorter posts, and maybe even multi-part series posts.| David Haney
On Plumbers Picture this situation: you woke up this morning to find that there’s no water coming through your valves and taps. No sink water. No shower water. Having no plumbing experience, you call around for a plumber. Plumber #1 Plumber #1, let’s call him Mario, tells you he can’t be bothered to come check out your issue because it’s minor and he’s very important and too busy for it. You explain that you really need a plumber, and he explains he’ll do it for 1.| David Haney
Background I’m going to discuss an important topic that affects everybody in tech: diversity. No, this won’t be some preachy post about how diversity is great and how you should be a better human being. Rather, I’m going to tell you about the things I’ve experienced working on diversity – particularly the interesting events of the last few days that happened internally at Stack Overflow. It’s no secret that the tech industry is not that diverse.| David Haney
In February of 2015, I was promoted to Engineering Manager at Stack Overflow. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. There are tons of things I’ve learned so far, some of which I’ve learned the hard way. There’s also a world of difference between managing code, and managing people who code. Your day to day work routine changes completely. You define success differently.| David Haney
A Job Listing Let’s say you were walking down a street one day and noticed an ad for help wanted. It is posted in the window of a bakery. It reads: HELP WANTED: Need a baker for FT work. Must be familiar with modern baking methods such as ovens, barbecuing, and deep fryers. 5+ years experience with the Super 6 commercial baking oven required (aside: came out in 2014). Nice to haves include experience with butcher’s blocks, chopping meat, and making candles.| David Haney
Intro We’re just two days from a brand new year and yet the primary measurement of a developer’s skill seems to be the same as it was 20 years ago. The most important classification to most companies is job title, as I talked about in great detail in my last post. The job title is acquired via working for a veritable slough of credentialist companies whose HR departments break it down very simply:| David Haney
Intro I’ve had a good career so far. I began working full-time as a programmer in 2008. At that time my title was Junior Developer. I had a decent boss and cool co-workers, and I cut my teeth on Java and .NET. It was a good experience. After 2 years at that gig, I felt that it was time to move on. I contacted recruiters, and one eventually found me a promotion: Systems Analyst.| David Haney
Intro Almost exactly 1 month ago today I found myself on a video call with Joel Spolsky. It feels insane to write that, even now, as it was a banner moment in my career. For me it was the equivalent of meeting a movie star who I had idolized since I was old enough to know what movies were. There had always been this Joel Spolsky guy throughout my career that I regularly read about and whose opinions on software development agreed with mine, and suddenly I was talking with him face to face.| David Haney
Jonathan Allen of InfoQ conducted an interview with me about one of my open source initiatives, SimplSockets. We discussed the value of TCP over HTTP and why Sockets are still relevant to programming. I’d like to thank Jonathan and InfoQ for the opportunity – it was a great discussion. Check it out here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/12/SimplSockets| David Haney
Well, it’s been nearly 2 months since my last post… I’m learning that if you want a blog to be successful, you have to carve time out of your busy life and make it happen. So, with renewed focus, I re-enter the fray. The Joel Test is a curious and honest thing. It has been around since the year 2000 and was invented by a guy named Joel Spolsky, as the name might imply.| David Haney