🧩 I fell into a trap. One I’m often warning others not to fall into. Two of them, actually. 💻 The solution I’m building for one client isn’t necessarily a hard problem. There are existing solutions, but we want a simple MVP at lowest cost, so most paid services are off the table. With our custom integration needs, we decided to roll most of it ourselves. No, this wasn’t the trap. ...
Intro I don’t know why this has been on my mind the last few weeks, but guess that means I need to write something down… I love Bruce Lee. I don’t generally think of myself of someone who has “heroes”, but if there is one person outside my father who has greatly inspired me and changed how I think about life, it would be Bruce Lee. At first, as a little kid with silly hopes and crazy dreams, it was just all the cool fighting scenes in his movies that made want to be like him. ...
Clarity for the purpose of this post 😏 code monkey, n. a computer programmer who is not involved in any aspect of conceptual or design work, but simply writes code to specifications given programmer, n. an organism that can turn caffeine into code. Introduction Once upon a time, (many, many moons ago) at the very start of my career, I was just a “code monkey”; an individual contributor to the grand scheme of the digital jungle being fed instructions from primates higher on the food chain and was expected to simply do what I’m told. ...
A while back I posted my first blog post, and the key take-away it seems people had from that was that “intentional learning” is key growing in your career and profession. The discussions I had following this made me think of another conversation I had with a new developer I recently hired. He noticed on my LinkedIn that I have a LOT of completed courses, and asked how I go about learning this much and if what I learn sticks. I gave him a brief overview, but thinking about things over the last week, I figured I could probably share more. ...
Intro I see a lot of videos and blogs these days about “how I would learn to code if I started over”, and “do these X things to get hired by FAANGs”. I see free and paid courses and tutorials on various platforms ranging from horrendous to amazing. I see people with zero experience spewing opinions with no real basis as facts, and people knowing less than them eating it up (or worse, arguing with people who actually know). ...