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Category Archives: Code

Shell scripts, JavaScript pedantry, CSS fixations, Java debugging, and the rest of the polyglotism.

Manufacturing the Talent Shortage

by !undefined

Manufacturing the Talent Shortage:

By Dimas Guardado, writing for Model View Culture. (Which, if you’re not making it a regular habit of reading the posts at Model View Culture, then you should get into that habit.)

This piece, combined with Carlos Bueno’s Refactoring the Mirrortocracy (which Guardado cites) should be required reading for anyone doing recruiting, interviewing, and/or hiring these days.

These two posts have been sitting as pinned tabs in my Chrome for a couple weeks while I figured out what to do or say about them. Ultimately I decided that there was no single pull-quote to lean on. But they’ve both got a good underlying thesis about the misuse of privilege among people (yes, mostly men) in engineering organizations and especially in start-ups. For what it’s worth, the conclusion that it led me to? That phrases like “we value passion and aptitude” are code for “we have no idea how to mentor people”.

The Root Cause Fallacy

by !undefined

“That’s why the search for a root cause is usually a witch-hunt in disguise, trying to find someone or something to blame. If you think there is really a single cause, you eventually must identify a single person. If you stop short of that, everyone knows the process was a farce. But blaming a person is also a farce. Everyone knows that someone’s being thrown under the bus and that wasn’t the real problem.”

–

Baron Schwartz, The Root Cause Fallacy

“Fallacy” might be a little strong, but yes, a dysfunctional post-mortem will descend into a witch-hunt and someone can wind up on the horns without any real solutions being proposed. Not that no one ever deserves to get strummed out, but it can’t be your first reaction.

Why Everyone (Eventually) Hates (or Leaves) Maven

by !undefined

“I suspect that even the designers of Unix shells are often surprised at the inventive uses developers have wrought with their simple but powerfully composable abstractions.”

–

Neal Ford, Why Everyone (Eventually) Hates (or Leaves) Maven

A post on composable systems (vs. contextual ones). It’s a thoughtful post, and worth a slow and careful read.

review: Client-Server Web Apps with JavaScript and Java

by Rob Friesel

Having just wrapped up Client-Server Web Apps with JavaScript and Java by Casimir Saternos (O’Reilly, 2014), I’d say that I mostly got out of it what I wanted, and that it serves as a good jumping-off point for developers that want to build “modern” web applications on top of the JVM. More than anything else, […]

review: Data Structures and Algorithms with JavaScript

by Rob Friesel

Mike McMillan’s Data Structures and Algorithms with JavaScript (O’Reilly, 2014) uses JavaScript as a vehicle for introducing a number of fundamental computer science concepts. It reminds me a little bit of Tom Stuart’s Understanding Computation 1 — that is, it’s a book about CS topics that targets people without a CS background. One might consider […]