For many years I have used a tagline similar to the current one, which includes the stipulation: “All posts made with 100% recycled electrons, sustainably crafted by artisanal artisans.” It was meant to be a gentle jab at frou-frou food shops, of the type I often frequent when writing these…

Coding interviews suck. They’re painful for everyone. But we need to assess technical ability, so we keep doing that. What if there were a better way? How we got here If you’re a programmer, there’s a 99% chance you’ve been in this part of an interview: “Okay, so, you’ve got to program a remote…

“No, Twitter, I didn’t want to shove that in all my friends’ faces, I just wanted to let the author know I liked it!” “Wait, if I heart this, who sees that?” “Hey, +Person? Hello? @Person? Can you see this?” “Save for later. No, that’s public! Crap. Wait, I mean…

You might be sabotaging the process from the get-go — We’ve all been there. The Dev team has worked really hard to nail down a search results page they think will really help users. You pull up your slide deck and start walking the stakeholders through it. “Okay, here’s what the user sees after they log in,” you say to…

Practicing is a skill. Learning to learn can really pay off. But it’s hard work, and rarely rewarded. Background: I trained as a musician for the first thirty years of my life. Music is a fascinating field where there are many orders of magnitude of skill, and you can easily…

Undoing the damage done to us by society. The Racist, Revealed It happened again. I was reading something written by someone I deem a member of [ethnic group], and I found myself making assumptions based on stereotypes of [that ethnic group]. Dammit! I thought I was past this! I’m all enlightened now, right…

Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. “The thing about code is, every line you write is another ball and chain around your ankle.” — Joe Hicklin We’ve all been there. We did it! We got the code to work! The page looks good, the server is…

Aspects of security are ways to ensure aspects of autonomy. Safety is, at a short remove, liberty; without safety, one cannot be free. The path lies through autonomy. Autonomy is control over yourself: self-determination of action, self-declaration of identity, and so forth. We slowly establish autonomy as a part of…

Or, why you’re always fitting four pounds of crap into three sacks. Someone — I can’t remember who — used to be very enamored of a colorful phrase for messed up situations: “ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag”. Every time I try to write for the web…