The World Of Web Development

Before getting into the meat of the article, let me define the scope of my argument. For the purposes of this post, I am only interested in dealing with web applications. My specific expertise is in the Rails framework, but I think my concerns are framework and language agnostic. Alright, so with an understanding that I’m only talking about web development let me just put it out there: I don’t see the value of writing...

I’m not a person that is lacking in self-confidence. I try to be honest with myself about what I do well and what I don’t. I’m pretty good at spending time with my kids. I’m not so good at taking out the trash. I don’t lack for confidence in my ability to both write code and manage teams of developers. That said: I was pretty excited when LinkedIn rolled out its endorsement feature. Soliciting recommendations...

Recently one of my posts made a bit of a stir on Hacker News. I really enjoyed the conversation that was had, and it got me thinking more about the whole development cycle and what we do as managers and development teams. I’ve worn just about every hat you can imagine in the web development world, from a junior dev on a larger team (i.e., pure code monkey) to being the technical co-founder of Goalee...

Let me lead off by saying that I don’t think tests are bad. I really don’t. But here’s the thing: I don’t care what your test-code ratios are. You know what the best test-code ratio is? Whatever you need to make sure your crap works while still getting product out the door. I can’t remember the last startup I read about that didn’t claim to have a strong TDD core. I’m a little weary of...

I grew up in a pretty modest environment (think poverty line) but we somehow managed to be on the forefront of having computers in the home. I don’t believe my parents ever purchased any of the machines, but we were frequently the recipients of hand-me-downs as others upgraded their hardware. We got our first computer when I was in elementary school when my uncle gave us an old Commodore 64. That machine was pretty awesome,...