Caffeinated Coder

I’ve been involved in a recruiting effort for the last 5-6 weeks and I have to admit that I’m starting to get discouraged. I don’t want to rant about how many subpar developers exists out there because those blog posts always annoy me and strike me as pathetically egotistical. Besides, debating whether the skills of [...]

It’s too hard to pick just one topic to delve into after a five month blogging hiatus, so I thought I would reenter the blogosphere by just spewing forth some random thoughts that have been floating around in my head lately. Lamda soup is yummy – As you probably guessed from the title of the [...]

Here’s the second half of my whirlwind chronological tour of my past year from the perspective of my blog and technical life (see first half here): July: Take THAT legacy code – I didn’t write a single post during this month, however I had a very productive time at work as a result of finally [...]

Here’s the first half of a whirlwind chronological tour of my past year from the perspective of my blog and technical life: Jan: Blogging Without a Net – I started off the year with a resolution to cast off the safety net of the massive GeeksWithBlogs blogging collective and venture out on my own. In [...]

This is part two of my quest to convince Jurgen and his fellow judges that I should be the one who gets to blow the $100 dollar Amazon gift certificate on cool Software Development books. In part one, I approached the question backwards by describing seven motivational anti-patterns. Now I’ll focus on the positive and [...]

I’ve decided to take a 2 part stab at answering Jurgen’s question about what motivates me in the work place. To start with, I decided to meditate on a few things that tend to grab my motivation by the metaphorical gonads and squeeze. In no particular order… Sunshine-Up-the-Arse Speeches – Luckily these are most decidedly [...]

I recently read Jurgen Appelo’s post, Professionalism = Knowledge First, Experience Last, and then Ted Neward’s somewhat harsh response, From the “You Must Be Trolling for Hits” Department…. Although both posts rang true when highlighting the various problems that occur when developers are deficient in either knowledge or experience, I don’t think either post pursued [...]

Someone (Max) finally pegged me with this old tech meme that has been floating the blogosphere forever. I decided to be a good sport about it, so here’s the whole seedy story of how I got started in the industry. How old were you when you started programming? Although I do remember spending several hours [...]

Everyone has memories of certain formative experiences that seemed to mark the end of naive adolescence and the beginning of cynical adulthood. When I think back over my career as a software developer, I realize that I’ve had several experiences that taught me some hard and valuable lessons about the art and science of software [...]