Valve, a Video Game Maker With Few Rules Valve gets a big feature in the New York Times. Unfortunately the article doesn’t really dig into discrepancies between the employee handbook and day-to-day life at the company. Maybe there aren’t very many, but it would be interesting to know.
I’ve been experimenting with a new approach to learning a programming language – porting code from a language I don’t know to one that I already do. In this case, I’m porting Scala code to Java. The traditional method of learning a language is to find a project and start writing code in the new language, and I’ve used it many times in the past. In this case, I’m trying to get up to speed on an existing code base written in Scala so that I can help maintain and extend it. Part of the work is learning how to write Scala, and part of it is becoming familiar with the structure and style of this code base. ...
I look at a lot of job applications submitted via the Web and I am consistently surprised by the number of applications that I see that don’t include cover letters. The thing is, I also know a lot of people who never read cover letters when they’re processing job applications. When you skip the cover letter, you take your chances. Here are some of the things I wonder about when I see an application that doesn’t include a personalized cover letter: ...
Bugged How a bug bite led to a $28,300 medical bill. As Greg Knauss relates, anyone without health insurance faces a daily risk of total ruin. Seems pertinent given the upcoming election.
One of the most interesting practices at Etsy is the use of blameless postmortems to learn from mistakes and create processes that prevent them from being repeated. If I could take only one thing from Etsy and implement in other organizations, it would be the concept of a Just Culture: Having a Just Culture means that you’re making effort to balance safety and accountability. It means that by investigating mistakes in a way that focuses on the situational aspects of a failure’s mechanism and the decision-making process of individuals proximate to the failure, an organization can come out safer than it would normally be if it had simply punished the actors involved as a remediation. ...
Stripe CTF 2.0 walkthrough I really regret not trying it out, a number of my coworkers were pretty obsessed with it.
The August 13 issue of The New Yorker had an article by Atul Gawande (one of my favorite writers) about how hospital chains are increasing quality and lowering costs by taking the individuality out of the practice of medicine. In it, he compares the way hospitals treat patients to the way Cheesecake Factory treats customers. It’s a great article, and the lessons in it apply to more than just the medical industry. ...
Active in Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing I have a theory that the startup industry exists to funnel venture capital dollars to Amazon.com. Here’s some evidence.
Neil Armstrong, 1930-2012 Great set of photos of the first man to walk on the moon from Alan Taylor.
Neil Armstrong, First Man on Moon, Dies at 82 On one hand, the most spectacular individual achievement in human history. On the other, the fruit of the combined work of an entire civilization. John Noble Wilford, the writer of Armstrong’s obituary, wrote the front page story on the moon walk for the July 21, 1969 edition of the New York Times.