Technical debt is something that every software company has to deal with at some point. Whether it’s from bad architectural designs or just changing business needs, at some point technical debt will need to be refactored. Here are a few tips I’ve pulled from my experience removing technical debt. Take Inventory The first step in dealing with technical debt is to take inventory of the entire codebase. Knowing the extent of the codebase is necessary before you can start removing or rewriting parts of it....

So, you’ve just been promoted to the dark side of management but you don’t know how to lead your minions? Here are a few tips on keeping your plebeians in line. Make Your Minions Do the Dirty Work You shouldn’t worry yourself about work that’s underneath you, you get paid way to much. You’ve hired coder monkeys to handle everything from downed servers at 3 am to documentation to those pesky clients....

In this article, I’ll go over the talks delivered on Day 2 of the Lead Developer Conference. Again, this was a fantastic conference that you should think about attending in the future, especially if you’re leading technical teams. You can read about Day 1 here and here. Kevin Goldsmith — Fail Safe, Fail Smart, Succeed Kevin Goldsmith started day two by speaking about how to fail as a team and how we can create environments to learn from failure....

After lunch, we came back to a number of excellent talks. I always find the afternoons the most difficult to pay attention to since your brain is full from the morning sessions and your stomach is full from lunch but at the Lead Developer Conference I found myself fully engrossed with all of the talks. You can read about the first part of day1 Rob Allen — 5 Features of a Good API This was the first technical talk of the day and it didn’t disappoint....

One June 8th and 9th I attended the Lead Developer Conference in London England. The two-day conference, geared towards Managers, Directors, VPs and CTOs, was extremely well planned and executed, and all of the speakers were top notch. In this post I’ll be summarizing and highlighting half of the talks from Day 1. If you’re interested in reading the other summaries you can do so for the second half of the first day and the second day....

When I was getting started early on in my career I made a lot of mistakes. I was unhappy, working for people who didn’t respect me and I was lost. I was unsure as to whether or not I wanted to continue being a developer and for a while, I was unsure if I’d ever be able to make it. I was working my butt off and burning myself out for a company I didn’t believe in....

Apparently there’s a lot of pugs in blankets In Part 1 of Speeding up Postgres Restores I talked about how we improved the time it took to restore our local environments. Initially, we started out naively pg_dump’ing (is this a word?), gzipping, unzipping, and then piping the output using psql < file.sql. This took over 30 minutes to do a full restore. In the end, we used Postgres’ custom format and used the job’s argument to speed up the restore to only 16 minutes....

I promise to teach you that it’s ok to fail and to love you when you do. I promise to support you in everything you do. To support your hobbies, your career aspirations and your life choices. I promise to teach you to respect and love all people regardless of race, gender, religion or sexual preference. I promise to be fair to you, praising you when you succeed and discipling you when you’re bad....

Hiring is hard. It’s a stressful process where you’re trying to find a good fit, both personally and technically, all in a few short hours. Over the last 7 years, I’ve hired many developers and while they haven’t all worked out, I’ve been very fortunate to have been able to work with some excellent people. In every case, as I’m sitting across from them in the interview, I focus on trying to see if the candidate exhibits the following five traits....

In early 2013 I transitioned from a developer to a manager of a team of 3 when my manager left suddenly. It took me over two years (and doubling the team size) until I felt like I really understood what it meant to be a manager and thought I was adding value. Here are a few things I’ve learnt and tips others gave to me. Less Coding By far the hardest thing for me to realize was that I needed to cut back the amount of coding that I did....