Global Nerdy

For those of you who enjoyed “Conference call bingo” from yesterday’s collection of links, here it is, rendered as a bingo card from days gone by. Looking at it, you can almost smell the cigarette smoke!

Over the past few years, I’ve managed to accumulate a ridiculously large backlog of links that I’d been meaning to blog about here on Global Nerdy. It’s time for me to do some spring cleaning, so from time to time, you’ll see these posts where I unload the links that are still good, both in the sense of still being online and still being valid and useful. Enjoy!

You may also want to see this earlier collection of links.

Things I Was Unprepared For As A Lead Developer (September 7, 2017)

Here’s Pascal de Vink at WebCamp Zagreb (2017) talking about the non-coding things that a lead developer does: delegating, culture building, mentoring, planning, meetings, dealing with upper management, and more.

On company culture

• It’s not an asshole problem — it’s a bystander problem (December 31, 2014): Cate Huston writes that the real problem that women in tech face isn’t the assholes, but the bystanders, who allow the assholes to continue with their ways.
• Ten unmistakable signs of a fear-based workplace (March 7, 2017): If you haven’t worked at a place where management practices rule by fear, consider yourself fortunate! Here’s how you spot these places before you get trapped in one — go and read the full article, but here’s my quick summary of those 10 signs:
  1. Everyone’s focused only on their immediate goals.
  2. Managers and HR specialize in assigning work, measuring results, punishing infractions and maintaining order.
  3. People are afraid to tell the truth because they already know no one wants to hear it.
  4. All people talk about is who’s in management’s “good books” and “bad books”.
  5. Employees wonder if they’ll have a job next week.
  6. Following rules and avoiding blame are top priorities.
  7. Managers pay lip service to collaboration and out-of-the-box thinking, but no one takes them seriously.
  8. Employees disappear without warning.
  9. It’s not the smartest and most capable employees who get promoted — it’s the ones who most wholeheartedly embrace the fear-based culture.
  10. No humor or humanity.
• In 2017, your internal culture is your brand (August 7, 2017): Written not long after James “Google Manifestbro” Damore wrote his terrible (and justifiably career-limiting) screed, this article explains that a company’s culture is now the story it tells about itself to the outside world.

The software developer’s sketchbook (January 1, 2015)

James Hague suggests that one of the problems with working on a few big projects is that this approach limits your expertise: “Someone who does roof work on fifty houses a year looks a lot more the expert than someone who needs two years to ship a single software project.”

To counter this, he suggests that developers could start building up a sketchbook, the way artists and crafters do:

This sketchbook of implemented ideas isn’t a paper book, but a collection of small programs. It could be as simple as a folder full of Python scripts or Erlang modules. It’s not about being right or wrong; many ideas won’t work out, and you’ll learn from them. It’s about exploring your interests on a smaller scale. It’s about playing with code. It’s about having fun. And you might just become an expert in the process.

The Programming Talent Myth (April 12, 2015)

In his keybote at PyCon 2015, Django co-creator and Heroku Director of Platform Security Jacob Kaplan-Moss describes himself as “At best, an average developer”. He talks about the myth of the “10x programmer” and how the dichotomy between the rock star programmer and the “average” developer is a false one.

Also worth checking out:

• In Praise of the Average Developer (May 8, 2015): An article inspired by the talk above.
• You are not a 10x developer (September 23, 2013): This article says that yes, 10x developers exist, but that’s largely because all human talent — from number of academic papers published, to Emmy nominations, to NBA career points, and yes, even programming — follows a power law distribution that looks like this:…which makes all but a very fortunate few below average.
• The mythical 10x programmer (February 28, 2017): Read this for the list of qualities that you can try to cultivate to be a more productive programmer.

The Myth of the Genius Programmer (Google I/O 2009):

Conference call bingo (September 19, 2017)

Found via Amy Wilson:

Click the comic to see it at full size.

They may be “dumb”, but combined with a diligent programmer, they are powerful.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Last night saw the very welcome return of the Tampa Bay PHP meetup, the local gathering of PHP programmers and would-be programmers in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, and surrounding areas. It took place in the training room of Sourcetoad’s Tampa office (pictured below), which is also home of Tampa iOS Meetup.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

PHP is Sourcetoad’s preferred server-side programming language. I can’t think of a single current Sourcetoad project with a server application that isn’t written in PHP. As a PHP-powered software company with a long history of promoting and supporting Tampa Bay’s burgeoning tech scene, our natural impulse was to help re-ignite Tampa Bay PHP by promoting it, giving it a venue and providing food and drinks for its attendees.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

The presentation, Laravel for the PHPurist, was given by James LaChance. It was a dress rehearsal; he’ll be giving this talk at the upcoming Sunshine PHP conference. Instead of being an introduction to the Laravel framework, it was more a defense of the framework and the choices and reasoning behind its design, with particular emphasis on the Façade pattern, which it uses in abundance (see here for details on façades in Laravel).

Click the photo to see it at full size.

It was great to see the return of the Tampa Bay PHP meetup. We hope to keep seeing more of them, and we’d love to continue hosting!

Over the past few years, I’ve managed to accumulate a ridiculously large backlog of links that I’d been meaning to blog about here on Global Nerdy. It’s time for me to do some spring cleaning, so from time to time, you’ll see these posts where I unload the links that are still good, both in the sense of still being online and still being valid and useful. Enjoy!

• An open letter to app developers: It’s from 2013, but most of these suggestions to app developers on how to make apps better for everyone still apply.
• 80% of your culture is your founder. That’s the first of three lessons that this articles tries to impart. The other two are about taking that first lesson and applying it.

Coming soon: Portable computers! (1994)

• How I became the most hated person in San Francisco for a day: Before the current tech backlash against Facebook, there was this guy. Long story short: techie creates app to “disrupt” another, less prestigious, worse paying industry and wonders why people are mad at him.
• Why women leave tech: What the research says. Sue Gardner put together this Google doc a few years back, based on information from more than 200 academic studies, surveys and industry white papers, as well as roughly 25 books and about 100 news stories and analysis and opinion pieces. As we’ve seen from the likes of James Damore and by the necessity of #MeToo, not much has changed.

• Habit stacking: 17 small productivity habits. These 17 mini-habits all come from S.J. Scott’s book, Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less. Most are common sense, but that’s pretty uncommon.
• How incredibly lazy people can form productive habits: It’s all about designing for laziness — making situations where it’s easier to do the right thing.
• Leading a team into the unknown: This HBR article suggests that when you’re leading a team on a project where you’re in unfamiliar territory or with a lot of unknowns, you should:
  • Set a grand challenge rather than dictating a vision
  • Design experiments rather than make decisions.
  • Don’t just ignite ideas, but prepare the organization to accept them.
  • Educate the wider organization.
  • Build expertise.
  • Don’t just give people time, but provide them with the resources to act quickly.
• The company you work for is not your friend: Yes, there are companies out there that do look out for their people. I work for one (Sourcetoad). But in most cases, while you may find a team or a manager that are your friend, to the company for whom you work, “You are a resource. That means the only one you can trust, really, is you. Here’s how to keep a cool head and stay in control of your career.”