Writing

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

Porcini Hunting - Find Your Guide

Porcini Hunting - Finding Your Programming Guide is a three-page micro-zine that draws a parallel between hunting for mushrooms and finding technical mentors and teachers. While this started as a test-draft for printing full-col...

Engineering Managers: It's Time to Write Better Job Descriptions

Software engineers have the highest turnover rate of any industry with an average tenure of 2~3 years. Why? Because people leave managers, not companies, and as Nicole Sanchez and Danilo Campos point out, tech is full of poor managers. I’ve been o...

Implementation Strategies for Integrating External Services Into Your Application

Much of modern software relies on external services to take responsibility for some aspect of the product’s feature set. This trend will only continue as mostly-single-purpose, non-database, API-first services such as Auth0, Drip, Twilio, Nylas, a...

You deserve a porcini hunting guide

Text from images transcribed below A friend recently learned how to forage for porcini mushrooms in the Sierras. At first, you see nothing – mushrooms are brown, and they seem invisible under the brown dirt and the brown leaf litter over the...

Passion isn't terrible

I heard this phrase a lot while hallway tracking at RubyConf, and I hear it regularly talking with clients seeking help with their hiring processes: “We look for passion in candidates.” There are two questions I ask when I hear this: What...