Dan McKinley :: On Misery
Not every fun activity or moral good is a waste of time.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
Not every fun activity or moral good is a waste of time.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
In my talk Egoless Engineering I make the case that results are better when teams cooperate, that punching down and other forms of brilliant-jerkhood are actually dumb, and that leaders should reward curiosity and generosity. I think misery is a dumb strategy and I am encouraged that some folks have found this case compelling.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
I recently read Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. It was good! You should read it. I want to say this up front, since after some preamble I’m going to describe a Rube-Goldbergian attempt to poke petty holes in it. I don’t want the reader to lose sight of the big picture, which is that I was trying to do this in the spirit of the book. Which again, is pretty good.| Dan McKinley
I’ve worked with deploy systems in the past that have a prominent “rollback” button, or a console incantation with the same effect. The presence of one of these is reassuring, in that you can imagine that if something goes wrong you can quickly get back to safety by undoing your last change.| Dan McKinley
Note: This was a post for Skyliner, which was a startup I co-founded in 2016. The post is recreated here since it makes some good points and was reasonably popular. But be advised the startup it describes is now defunct (we sold ourselves to Mailchimp in 2017).| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
Coda and I have been using Clojure to build Skyliner for the last fourteen months or so. I thought it might be a good idea to write down some of our experiences with this, for the benefit of others considering it for practical work.| Dan McKinley
Building a web application is a young and poorly-understood activity. Toolchains for building code in general are widely available, relatively older, and they also happen to be closest at hand when you’re getting started. The tendency, then, is to pick some command line tools and work forwards from their affordances.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
There were rumblings earlier this week that Alphabet executives mused| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
Ship Small Diffs - I tried to transmute the anguish I feel looking at huge changesets into words.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
I was speaking on a panel the other day that was handed the topic, “the challenges of balancing data-light product bets vs purely data driven incremental improvements.” Camille Fournier was also a panelist and wrote up her thoughts here. Camille’s take (which I think is right) is that even if you don’t have data to work from, you can still approach projects analytically.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
Please note that Roberto Medri is a coauthor on this post.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
In response to Kellan’s musing about push notifications on twitter, Adam McCue asked an interesting question:| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
Choose Boring Technology (Expanded, Slide-Based Edition)| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
Here’s a video of me doing a slightly-amended version of my Data Driven Products talk at the Lean Startup Conference back in December.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
I saw lizTheDeveloper’s post about technical leadership at Simple and I realized that I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. I hope to persuade you that there are a number of systemic biases working against a healthy technical career path. I don’t think that they’re insurmountable, and I don’t disagree with Liz’s post. But I’ve never heard of a company clearing all of these hurdles at once.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
Data Driven Products Now!| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
The person on build rotation, or the nightly schlimazel I suppose, went into a hot 5’x8’ closet containing an ancient computer. This happened after everyone else had left, so around 8:30PM. Although in crunch time that was more like 11:30PM. And we were in crunch time at one point for a stretch of a year and a half. “That release left a mark,” my friend Matt used to say. In a halfhearted attempt at fairness to those who will take this post as a grave insult, I’ll concede that my rem...| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
Scalding at Etsy| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
For four months ending in early 2011, I worked on team of six to redesign Etsy’s homepage. I don’t want to overstate the weight of this in the grand scheme of things, but hopes flew high. The new version was to look something like this:| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become the engineer that wrote Data Driven Products Now! if Kellan had not been there to so thoroughly stick the landing on technology choices.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
