There’s an old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation about Picard falling in tragic love with an alien woman. Okay, there’s a bunch of those, but there’s one in particular in which the alien has the ability to change her personality to perfectly match her mate, and become the…

(This is a direct copy of the 2021 Edition, with the salient changes italicized, because Medium doesn’t have the option of coloring them.) You know those recipe websites filled mostly with the backstory of how they discovered this amazing cookie recipe that changes their lives, and what joy it brings…

The job interview process is a high-stakes dance that’s notoriously difficult and full of missteps — on both sides. (At least, in software engineering it is. If you care about another industry, <Jedi hand wave/> this is not the article you’re looking for.) Avoiding the missteps is an art, just…

I’m starting what I’m sure will be a great new job at an awesome company soon, but before I got that offer (and four other great ones), I was on the interview circuit for a few months. When I started looking, I figured that in this boiling job market (of…

A few years ago, I was asked to give a talk to a class of early engineering college students about the characteristics of a “good” engineer, so that they may begin to emulate those traits — or, presumably, drop out of the program if the very thought of such a…

The main reason science works is, of course, the scientific method. It forces rigor into the process and it’s what began to fork hard science from philosophy. Engineering, while not a science per se, is a sibling discipline. It too benefits from the scientific method (though more so in the…

The principle of DRY code is probably one of the most important bedrocks of professional programming. It’s a hallmark of what separates an amateur coder from a legitimate engineer: thinking ahead; designing your codebase; making it flexible, modular, and maintainable. If you haven’t come across the acronym before, it stands…

It doesn’t take long to appreciate a great software tester. And it doesn’t matter if she’s a manual tester or writes automated tests, because what really matters are the types of tests being run: curious tests. Tests that don’t just discover a bug and quickly document it away in a…

First, let me reassure you that they don’t: 50 years of research have shown us that if anything, incentives demotivate employees. And not just developers, but any job that requires some thought beyond mechanistic, rote work like the assembly line. This is succinctly explained in the most popular RSA Animate…