Posts

Two attempts to define the job of a CTO, one by Camille Fournier, from Rent the Runway, and one from Greg Brockman, from Stripe. The bottom line from Camille: My advice for aspiring CTOs is to remember that it’s a business strategy job, first and foremost. It’s also a management job. If you don’t care about the business your company is running, if you’re not willing to take ultimate responsibility for having a large team of people effectively attacking that business, then CTO is not the job for you. ...

(by way of @scienceporn) The news story of the week is the Greek elections that put the left wing anti-austerity Syriza into power. The Economist has a useful article on the implications for the broader Euro-zone. As Paul Krugman explains, the austerity measures Greece has imposed at the behest of the institutions that bailed it out have been ruinous for the Greek people. The best overall article I’ve read on what happens next is from the New Yorker’s John Cassidy. ...

Look, it’s a blog post full of links! In the New York Times, Scott Shane reviews Guantánamo Diary, which is in fact the diary of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who has been detained at Gitmo without charges since 2002. An attempt to definitively answer the popular interview question, What happens when you enter an address in your browser?, by Alex Gaynor. For some reason, it never occurred to me that YouTube’s massive audience equates to massive power. Zoë Keating reports on the onerous terms YouTube is requiring her to accept in order to publish her YouTube channel. ...

I have a couple of long posts in the works. The first is some thoughts on Peter Seibel’s essay on feedback from a manager’s perspective. The other is a post that I started writing on Martin Luther King Day but didn’t finish. Today I caught Jason Kottke’s post on link blogging, and it got me thinking about links as well. While I don’t publish as many posts as I once did, for a number of reasons, I do still churn through a lot of interesting links every day, and there a variety of places you can go to see them. ...

Everybody is talking about the New York Times op-ed, Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others, because everybody wants to talk about the fact that it says research shows that teams with more women perform better. My anecdotal experience aligns with the research, but I want to talk about another point that the article makes. Here’s a snippet: Online and off, some teams consistently worked smarter than others. More surprisingly, the most important ingredients for a smart team remained constant regardless of its mode of interaction: members who communicated a lot, participated equally and possessed good emotion-reading skills. ...

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress on Paul Graham’s argument that we the government needs to grant far more U.S. visas for software engineers: I agree that the US deserves dramatically better immigration policies, but in the meantime I’m confused with the head-in-the-sand approach most tech companies are taking simultaneously complaining that there are lots of great people they can’t bring into the US, but being stubborn on keeping a company culture that requires people to be physically co-located. ...

I’ve read two really excellent posts about hiring engineers lately. Both of them are aimed at adding nuance to the discussion of “hiring the best.” The first, from Cate Huston in Model View Culture takes this on directly in her essay, We Hire the Best. Here’s her rephrasing of “hiring the best”: Among people we know, we hire “the best” (as determined by our subjective process), who are willing and able to work in a specific place (or remotely), and who accept our offer. ...

Code of Ages Scott Rosenberg talks about Go, Swift, and how big companies bring new programming languages into the world. If nothing else, worth reading as an excellent example of how you write about software development for a non-technical audience.

Luke O’Neal in the Washington Post on Black Friday and how it is advertised: It’s hard to avoid the message of those ads. We’ve been bombarded with them for weeks now, from corporations eager to entice shoppers with so-called “door-buster” deals. And then, once the shopping public falls for them, a privileged segment of the population sits back and dehumanizes them for its collective amusement. Look at these hilarious poor people, struggling to take advantage of a deal on something they might not otherwise be able to afford on items that we take for granted, we joke on Twitter. The message is the same: this is shameful, materialistic behavior. And by pointing it out, we differentiate ourselves, reaffirm our class status as being above the fray of the lowly and desperate. ...

Vagrant is one of those things I hear people talking about but that I’ve never gotten around to playing with, or hadn’t gotten around to playing with until today. Vagrant is a solution to the problem of setting up a local development environment for Web development. Depending on the platform you use, this can be rather difficult. I don’t even want to think about Windows development, but even in a Unix-like environment (OS X or Linux), you can still run into problems. ...