Management: Organization Size May Not Be As Important As You Think

I recently interviewed with a company who was looking for a senior engineering leader, and the conversation took a surprising turn, so I want to take a few minutes with you good folks and think about what makes a manager qualified to build or lead an organization of a certain size.

Posted by Howard Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Engineering Values and Principles

In almost every engineering all-hands, the senior engineering leader has a slide where they present a set of core engineering values. I guess it shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise, then, when a colleague finally asked me what my core principles were. It's more than just a reasonable question - being clear about values and principles can provide a crucial north star when needing to make a decision in the face of ambiguity. After reflecting for a bit, I put together the following list...

Posted by Howard Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Kicking the Tires with GitHub Actions

As components break down into smaller units, more dependencies between those components means I need more rigor in producing them. I've been following the progress of GitHub Actions since it was first announced, but hadn't actually tried using it until now.

Posted by Howard Tuesday, August 30, 2022

The Right Tool, The Right Idiom

As more and more traditionally-trained developers have migrated into the Javascript space, I've seen quite a few attempts to bring across idioms, patterns, and even and tools commonly found in large OO code bases. Some of those things have made their way into the core language itself and some have caused the creation of new languages. Nearly all of these examples illustrate the application one tool chain's idioms onto another - and in many of the above examples, the result is unintentional and unnecessary complexity.

Posted by Howard Monday, June 13, 2022

My Workflow v2

Some friends of mine recently released a podcast episode on the topics of attention management related tools, and it turned out that one of the resources they referenced was an old blog post of mine on the topic; so maybe that's a decent place to start and see what's worked out, what hasn't, and what new circumstances necessarily change strategy.

Posted by Howard Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Changes

I'm going to break from the usual work-related topics to talk about a few major changes that are afoot with me and my family.

Posted by Howard Saturday, April 13, 2019

RDF Inferencing In Action

If you've been reading this blog for any period of time, you've probably heard me go on about linked data is magically awesome. In this post, I'll show you an example.

Posted by Howard Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Functional Javascript Playground

I'm a big believer that the functional programming approach may be the only way to write Javascript code and stay sane. To continue building up my own skill as well as share some of those opportunities with you, I've created a repository to show and get feedback on examples.

Posted by Howard Monday, August 20, 2018

Your Web API is Not the WWW

One of the most common techniques used by the REST faithful to shut down any questioning of the faith is to appeal to the WWW. This post attempts to establish the fallacy of such an appeal.

Posted by Howard Tuesday, June 26, 2018

A Question on Aggregate APIs and Microservices

I received the following question from one of our service teams last week and thought it was likely the type of issue that a lot of you are dealing with (or have solved) in our current world of 'microservice all the thingz!'

Posted by Howard Monday, April 2, 2018

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ABOUT ME
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I’m into a bit of everything. Some might say that makes me attention-deficit - I like to think it gives me the ability to see things from more angles. I’m a huge technology enthusiast, and while I've worked for some pretty large tech companies, my interests are pretty broad. The opinions here are mine alone.