May 2017

May 31, 2017


May 28, 2017

What happens to older programmers? and other questions on Quora

Quora: What happens to older programmers? Some become managers, many keep coding, the answers are pretty good. Keep in mind that there’s hardly been many old programmers yet.

As an aside, I find Quora questions fascinating. The questions run from the practical to the existential (what’s the point of life?) to the polemic (don’t good programmers use ‘else’?; will PHP die out in 2017?).

There’s something both startling and amusing when someone asks: what are the best gems to be used with Ruby on Rails for a dating / social network website? — and receives candid answers! I appreciate the specificity, but that’s baldly a bold ask.

I suppose what’s most fascinating is what the questions say about us.

Ilya

May 18, 2017


May 9, 2017

  • How we manage technologists at x.ai. Tl;dr: tech in single team (e.g. not split by specialism or function), people managers don’t code, technologists choose their own managers every six months. Conferences paid for from company-wide budget, there is no approval, withdrawals are just documented publicly.

May 5, 2017


May 3, 2017

Normalised or not, SQL is 43 years old and the 2nd most common language

In 2008, Jeff Atwood suggested maybe normalising isn’t normal. Still a great reference and reminder for designing your database structures. Also, SQL, the second most common programming language in Stack Overflow’s 2017 developer survey, is 43 years old—here’s eight reasons we still use SQL.

Ilya

May 2, 2017