Writing

Our articles and podcast episodes on software engineering, management and collaboration.

Accepting Feedback with Emily Nakashima

Accepting Feedback with Emily Nakashima

Episode 2 covers the topic of accepting feedback with Emily Nakashima (@eanakashima on Twitter). Emily manages the engineering and design teams at a small developer tools startup called Honeycomb.io. Before Honeycomb, Emily worked at a string of...

Managing Up with Marco Rogers

Managing Up with Marco Rogers

Episode 1 covers the topic of “managing up” with Marco Rogers (@polotek on Twitter). Marco was previously an engineering manager and director at companies like Yammer, Clover Health, and Lever, and is now happily writing code for Mode Analytics. ...

Roses are red / This pairing is for you

Roses are red / This pairing is for you

It took me a long time to understand the joys of pair programming. When I took my first computer programming class in the 1990s, computers were a limited resource. The newer, better computers were used by two people together. I took a significa...

Lessons Learned from our First Real World Code Live Stream

Earlier this month, Betsy and I tried to live stream a pairing session and failed miserably. But! We had fun, so we spent about 30m performing a retrospective on our Debugging a Race Condition in Cypress event. To expose our ignorance (and therefo...

Real World Code Incident Report! How We Used the OODA Loop to Triage a Amazon RDS Cascade Failure for a Heroku-hosted Rails App

Notabli reached out to us the day after Christmas because their API was falling over. Their Friendly Engineer, Ty Rauber was working hard with their Head of Product, Jackson Latka, to bring it back up. They wanted a second pair of programmer-eyes,...