My hand writing was awful. But I fixed it. Here’s the before picture. Note that its not even handwriting, its printing. That’s because like most people, I gave up on handwriting. Here’s the thing. Handwriting, or rather, connecting letters is…
Category: Technology
Posts about Technology I like
Engineering processes: How to bootstrap good process in your startup
Ok, so you’ve got a small technology company and you’ve hit that threshold of about 4 people where it becomes glaringly obvious that you need to institute some process. Or perhaps your engineering team is smaller than that, but you realize that if you don’t spent at least a minimal amount of time on planning your work, you’re going to spend a lot more time doing the wrong work, the less important work, or delivering the wrong thing.
This article will help you bootstrap some minimal processes that will enable you to be much more effective. It should be enough to carry you to the point that you have to split engineering into multiple groups at about 10-20 people.
New post on the Chegg Tech Blog
My latest post is about making sure you have enough states in your Service Oriented Architecture to make the system robust. You can check it out here. Posted with Blogsy
Why I don’t think MySQL is a good choice for the cloud
Databases are all about I/O speed. If you believe that 20% of the data is 80% of the queries, then any database over five times RAM is too large to be fast. In most businesses data over a year old…
Cupcakes instead of Layer Cakes and Mocks for Integration Testing
At every company I’ve ever worked at we needed more automated tests. The problem is that you can only do so much with Unit Tests in Cloud/Enterprise development. You need “integration tests”, but those become a huge pain in the…
Apple should offer a public cloud
Apple needs to become a public cloud provider. This will be an ambitious undertaking because frankly, they’re very far behind Amazon. But if they did so, it would be hugely successful. Because these days, every app you see ends up…
To Office for IPad or not to Office for iPad
So there were rumors this week that Microsoft was going to ship a version of Office for iPad. I have no opinion one way or another whether they will or not. But I admit to being intensely curious about…
Why iBook Author is Ho-Hum
So professionally, this was an interesting week for me. Wednesday, Chegg shipped their new eReader which is the project I’ve been working on since August. It’s HTML5, and its a faithful representation of the books (more on why that’s important…
Always Learning: The Good Will Hunting Method
There’s a scene in the movie Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon tells this stuck-up guy in a bar: ” You blew $150,000 on an education you could have gotten for a $1.50 in late charges at the public library.”…
Why Agile Works: The Success Well
One of the useful concepts I learned in martial arts was the idea of a success well. Every person has a success well. If you try something and fail, your success well empties. If you try something and succeed, you…