Posts for "Software"

A couple weeks ago I attended a conference held by Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm that underwrites many of the tech IPOs in our market (e.g. Wayfair, Hubspot, Apigee). The keynote speaker was Bill Ruh, Chief Digital Officer of GE, who gave a very engaging talk about the

Before my company achieved product market fit, we had certain unspoken values within our software team. These included: move fast, take risks, minimize process / management overhead, empower individuals, prioritize features over infrastructure, find the MVF (Minimum Viable Feature), execute in the presence of customers, self-organize, obsess over customers, and deliver

One of the most common soft skill gaps with software engineers is the ability to influence others. This gap of course is a byproduct of the nature of our work. From the time we graduate college, our influence is directed more at the technology we use than the people with

I read a recent blog post by Adam Pisoni, CTO & co-founder of Yammer, titled I’m Sorry But Agile Won’t Fix Your Products. It’s a great read and drives home a truth that often gets overlooked in our industry: small, empowered and self-organizing teams almost always produce

A few years ago I had a project manager from my team in Scotland send me a copy of Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal after learning I’d never read the 1984 classic. At the time, the constraint this team was struggling with was an ability to get software specifications

Confession: I have a love hate relationship with product documentation. While I can appreciate the value of well written technical documentation, I can’t help but feel it has a poor ROI these days. So when I started my current company, I committed myself to investing in an intuitive user

The excitement was running high last night while we waited for the final voting results from our Spring 2015 CloudHealth hackathon. The presentations were over, the beer had run out, and everyone was enjoying some well deserved post-hackathon socializing. We followed the same format as our last hackathon: at 5

Every day across the tech industry, teams gather for daily stand-up meetings. While the structure varies by organization, the intent is the same: to efficiently provide status and identify blocking issues. While I have attended many stand-ups over the years, I have an odd footnote in my personal history: I

The Lean movement has made everyone aware of the importance of a feedback loop in driving the success of businesses, products and features. By driving tight and iterative Build-Measure-Learn loops, organizations can limit the risk of their investments and not overcommit resources toward initiatives that either fail or do not

While sprint planning is an important activity for any software development organization, it takes on a new level of criticality in a startup. A good sprint planning process can improve the likelihood for success of a young company; a bad one can directly contribute to its failure. So I’m

I remember the moment I realized I wanted to spend the rest of my career building software. I was at my first job post-college, in my early twenties, and in the office at 9 PM writing code. The company I had joined was on the verge of spiraling out of

I like to think I’m an Agile Pragmatist in a world of Agile Fundamentalists. I believe there is no single framework / process that is a panacea to the various issues within a software development organization, and instead processes must be adapted to fit the specific needs of a business,

When I started writing the MVP for my current startup, I chose Ruby on Rails out of familiarity. I will also confess to harboring a secret Lord of the Rings vision of a single programming language to rule them all: Ruby for web (RoR), distributed systems development (JRuby), automation (Chef)

I was curious what the most common programming languages were on the profiles of software developers in the Boston area. The above chart is based on searching for "software developer" within 50 miles of Boston using a keyword for each language. It comes as no surprise that Java

About twice a day, I get an email / LinkedIn request from an offshore software company offering me their services. Underneath the steady incoming offers is an unstated fact: offshore development isn't what it used to be. Somewhere between the aftermath of the Dotcom Bust and today, offshore development went from

Okay, I promise this is the last quote. There were three sections that really stood out for me in The Lost Interview: the dynamic range of the best, the hard work and craft in building great products, and content vs. process. This is the quote for the latter. “People get

"Many companies get the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people here’s this great idea then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is

So we all know a software developer working at Google is not likely to be working at Fidelity / Bank of America, and visa versa. The environment, the challenges, the people, and even the technologies they use are likely to be very different. The reason is simple: the vastly different cultures

“I observed something very early on at Apple, I didn’t know how to explain it then, but I’ve thought about it since. Most things in life, the dynamic range between ‘average’ and the ‘best’ is, at most, two-to-one. If you get into a cab in New York City

Years ago I was running a development team for a systems management startup. Several of the prospective customers required software agents to run on their servers, and our solution was still months from release. One week a talented SE in the company decided to take it upon himself to solve

One of the often overlooked innovations from the first Scrum team was the rigorous commitment to weekly demos. This innovation came in the dark ages of waterfall, when a typical software release took a year or more and the concept of demonstrating incremental weekly progress made little sense in most

My first programming languages were Apple BASIC and LOGO, learned in elementary school on my Apple Plus / IIe. I thought I loved these languages, until one day installing an 80-column card in my Apple, I met Pascal. It was like magic; love at first site. Pascal and I went steady

While Ruby is one of the most productive and expressive languages in which I have programmed, I’ve been wondering lately whether the existence of the GIL has stunted its growth for concurrent programming. Instead of building concurrency into the language, most of the focus in the community has been

When my two older sisters were children they discovered a pile of golden nuggets in the backyard. Assuming they were suddenly rich, they enthusiastically collected every last nugget before running to tell my father. When my father came out to look at their treasure, he found a pile of... rabbit

As a VP of engineering, I have more than once scrambled to reconcile some aspect of my team’s use of open source before closing a major business agreement. While the use of open source is almost never a driver behind the acquisition of a company, more than a few