Notes from the work
An archive of product, engineering, startups, and the decisions behind building software. Older posts stay dated; they are here as a record, not a publishing schedule.
One antipattern I see often is the magic number. The magic number antipattern is a direct usage of a number in a function. Here is an example that comes from Refactoring by Martin Fowler. function potentialEnergy(mass, height) { return mass * 9.81 * height; } What the hell is 9.81? Yeah, I don’t know either. […]
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to build out the test suite for an open source project called Tributejs. I had to learn about karma, browserify, babel and babelify. It took an entire day to figure out how front end build tooling works. Here are some lessons I learned. You can see my pull request here. […]
Note: This article was originally published in May 2018 on LinkedIn articles. About a year ago, I joined Liberty Mutual. You may have read my post about it. My goals at Liberty were centered around becoming a technical leader. Over the past 12 months, I… 1.) Led a team of 5 developers through evolving priorities with […]
Over the last three years, I was at a startup, a large company, and a smaller company inside a larger company. I’ve interviewed. I’ve been interviewed. I’ve been the deciding vote and I’ve watched great people get passed over. I’ve seen whiteboarding, pair programming, coderpad technical interviews, hacker rank challenges, take home assignments, written tests, and […]
After weeks of reflection and learning, I decided to take a position at Liberty Mutual. I spent about a year at CoachUp. It was the highlight of my professional career. I learned a lot about software, design patterns, agile, and the craft of writing software. I wanted to continue learning and taking steps towards the […]
A few weeks ago, I found this website: http://teachyourselfcs.com It is a structured curriculum for someone who has been writing code, but never learned the fundamentals of Computer Science – someone like me! It has approximately 8 main topics you should learn, a preferred order you should learn them. For each topic, it recommends the […]
Book placement is key for finding time to read. I keep 2 books on my nightstand next to my bed. Depending on the mood I’m in, I might read one or another. One is usually about business. One is usually a well known book like The Great Gatsby or Brave New World. I also have […]
3 months gone, and I’m 8 books into my goal of 26 for the year. How do I find to read? That’s simple – every morning, I have a goal to read at least 1 page of a book. It sounds trivial, but it’s a start. It gets you in a cadence. It creates a […]
My time at CoachUp has come to an end Almost a year ago, I announced the start of my tenure at CoachUp and my departure from Eaton Vance. Today, I am announcing that my tenure at CoachUp is over. If you don’t know the story by now, CoachUp laid off 50% of the company at the […]
I had a technical interview two days ago. The algorithm I was asked to build was based around anagrams. If you’re not familiar with what an anagram is, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Two words are anagrams of one another if their letters can be rearranged to match one another. dan, and, nad, dna, adn […]