December 4, 2021

I Aged Myself Out of Software Development

2021 will mark the year I aged myself out of software engineering roles. About a month ago, on a Sunday, during an on-call shift, I considered a priority I told myself was unacceptable: staying home during an on-call instead of taking my kids to their activities. Had I stayed home instead of taking my kids out, I would have sent my resignation letter the next day. I told myself I would.

November 14, 2021

Passive Analytics Collection - Methods

This post is a continuation of my previous post introducing a strategy for passive UI metrics collection. In that post, I highlighted why metrics collection is hard, how I see metrics collection commonly done in the wild, and outlined a strategy I think is superior from both a technical and business perspective. In this post I will demonstrate this strategy with a live demo and summarize the types of UI metrics commonly helpful when understanding how people use your software.

October 24, 2021

Passive Analytics Collection - A Strategy

I’ve come to learn that collecting application metrics is tricky to get right. Developer needs, product needs, design needs, and senior management needs differ. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to gathering and organizing those metrics. A consistent theme throughout my career has been that while we have the best intentions when collecting UI interaction data, we rarely provide the depth of data sufficient to answer critical business questions from product and design.

October 27, 2019

Working Remotely: Lessons Learned

I’ve worked my entire career in tech from either a satellite office, as a remote employee, or a combination of the two. Through several life events, working remotely has been both a blessing and a curse, and this post is to highlight some of the ups and downs of working remotely as a tech employee as well some lessons learned along the way. To set the stage, my experience has been with two of the four FANG companies (doesn’t really matter which ones, just that these are big shops), working in satellite offices, for remote teams, but in major US and Canadian cities.

May 25, 2019

Fundamentals: Frontend Developer

I’ve been conducting a lot of interviews this year helping organizations in my company hire front-end developers and it is proving a challenge. The primary issues in my judgement are an industry trend toward “full-stack” developers as well as a heavy reliance on frameworks across the industry. The majority of applicants applying for front-end positions (at least at the company I work for) are only front-end developers in-so-far as they are familiar with React/Angular and are moderately competent in Javascript.

December 26, 2018

Using Typescript with AWS Lambda

My 2018 side projects have nearly all included the use of AWS Lambda. From Alexa skills to APIs to notification services, I’ve become adept at building and deploying Lambda-based services this year. As a front-end developer in my day job, I’m most comfortable coding in Javascript. But Javascript feels like the wrong tool for a middle tier or back-end service. The lack of types make these services unnecessarily difficult to read and reason about.