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Developer Stockholm Syndrome

Developers seem to have an irrational love/hate relationship with programming languages. We tend to love the languages we use on a regular basis. And we seem to hate languages we don’t or no longer use. I’ve come to refer to this as Developer Stockholm Syndrome. As a quick aside before we get into the main content, there is endless debate about what constitutes a programming language. For example, many will say SQL is not a programming language. I say it is. Regardless, this post is about languages and language-adjacent entities and I use the term “programming language” to include them all.

  • hate
  • languages
  • life
  • love
Thursday, January 10, 2019 | 9 minutes Read
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Pivoting Your Career

I recently found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to look for a new job. Thanks to the “alleged” poor life decisions of a certain former leadership person, the company I had poured most of the last four years into was closing its doors. We’d limped along best we could for a time after the “event”, but it was not to be. It was time to put it out of its misery. Those of us that had survived that long suddenly found ourselves with a need to go job hunting.

  • career
  • transition
Saturday, November 17, 2018 | 8 minutes Read
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Embrace Failure

For all of us, there will times, many times, when our efforts end in failure. Sometimes, they will be small failures. And sometimes, they will be spectacular failures. Sometimes, you will be at fault. And sometimes, despite all your best efforts, someone else will be at fault. It doesn’t matter. It’s just another opportunity. Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill Recognize The first thing you need to do is recognize there is a failure. A lot of times, this is easy. It smacks you upside the head. Like when your employer goes out of business, for instance. Other times, it’s hard to recognize the failure. We don’t see it. We don’t want to see it. Maybe because it’s too painful to acknowledge.

  • failure
Monday, November 12, 2018 | 5 minutes Read
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My Advice: Finding a Developer Job

Note: This is all my opinion. It has no basis in scientific theory or groundbreaking research on job searches. It is based solely on my own personal experiences hunting for jobs over the years, as well as experiences related to me by other people in the tech community that I know personally. It’s a highly limited subset, being mainly restricted to the central Ohio area. You have been warned. It’s a great time to be in the tech industry in general. Unemployment is down in most areas in the tech sector. You have the advantage. Use it. As with all things, times change. There were times it wasn’t good to be in tech. Those times will likely come again. But for now, you’ve got it good. If you’re not happy where you’re at right now, do something about it. Go and find a new job.

  • change
  • job-search
Wednesday, October 17, 2018 | 21 minutes Read
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Take Time to Breathe - A Few Minutes to Better Code

In a previous blog post, I talked about taking time to unplug in order to avoid burnout. That’s not what this is about. This is about getting in the zone. It’s about those times when you are so deep into the code that you just keep going and going. This is about those times when you get an idea and you dive headlong in and don’t come up for air for hours. Stop it. Stop it right now. Take a step back. Take a moment to breathe.

  • balance
  • burnout
  • productivity
Wednesday, July 11, 2018 | 9 minutes Read
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The Problem with StackOverflow/StackExchange

The StackExchange sites are a collection of websites on various topics where people can ask questions and get answers from members of that community. People can also up-vote or down-vote both the questions and the answers, as well as add comments regarding either. People receive ranking points, called “reputation”, for asking questions and on how many up-votes/down-votes their questions and answers receive. It’s intended to drive an active (and interactive) community of people around each subject area. The first and most popular of the sites is StackOverflow.

  • civility
  • gatekeeping
  • inclusivity
  • stackexchange
  • stackoverflow
Thursday, May 3, 2018 | 10 minutes Read
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Hey Devs, You Are Not Expected To Know Everything

There was a tweet that entered my timeline yesterday that really caught my attention: If you’re a new programmer I just want you to know, me and all of my colleagues with years of experience Google the most basic things _daily_ Accounting Shower Curtain and Unusual Bedroom (@oliviacpu) December 13, 2017 It seems one of the most basic concepts. Yet it gets completely hidden by the developer community. It doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have in a particular language. There are still things you will have to look up EVERY SINGLE DAY. I really started to think about it. Why are we ashamed to admit that publicly? A couple of reasons came to me pretty quickly: Ego and envy.

  • career
  • development
  • productivity
Thursday, December 14, 2017 | 5 minutes Read
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Avoid Burnout: Take Time To Unplug

One of the biggest struggles that developers face is burnout. I’ve seen it happen time and time and time again. We do too much. We work 40, 50, 60 or more hours a week in an office doing development work, then come home and spend another 20, 30 or more hours at home working on our personal projects or side clients. Add to all that the various levels of personal commitments we might outside of development, be it family, church, charity work, and so forth. All that time takes its toll and, if we’re not careful, it overwhelms us and we burn out. It happened to me.

  • burnout
  • unplug
Saturday, October 28, 2017 | 9 minutes Read
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What I do as a developer

A lot of people ask me what I do as a developer. Well, it’s pretty simple. I convert marketing promises (more commonly referred to by developers as lies and bullshit) into applications (referred to by developers as see the amazing creation of perfection I have created that somewhat resembles the lies marketing told but is in every way better than their promises anyway). See, it’s simple!

    Tuesday, October 24, 2017 | 1 minute Read
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    The Unroll.me Controversy - Its Our Fault

    A tweet caught my attention yesterday afternoon that was related to the whole Unroll.me/Uber data collection situation. Users’ data is being anonymized and then sold by Unroll.me, with one of the buyers in this situation being Uber. The co-founder of Unroll.me posted a message to Medium which basically put the responsibility for the controversy on the end users of Unroll.me.

      Saturday, April 22, 2017 | 4 minutes Read
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      My Dev Story

      One of the things I don’t talk about much is my development history. It’s not that I mind talking about the journey that got me to this point, but I just don’t think about it all that much. I decided, though, it was time to document it so that anyone who might ever be interested can know. Thanks to my late father, my interest in computers and programming started very early. I still remember the day he brought home a little black Sinclair ZX81 computer. I was around 9 years old and I loved tinkering around with the “massive” 1K of memory and the membrane keyboard that was nigh impossible to actually type on. We added a cassette recorder for tape storage, the tiny printer and eventually the huge 16K RAM add-on memory block. It was fun to play around with and I would spend hours entering lines of code copied from a magazine or book. It was my first introduction to programming (and the BASIC language in particular) and it has stuck with me for a lifetime.

        Thursday, March 9, 2017 | 7 minutes Read
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