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To Viper, or not To Viper
A few years ago, we had a lead engineer who introduced us to VIPER, an architecture for iOS. Willing to give it a try, we ended up using it for 10 of our most active features. This is a story of how VIPER came into our codebase, and how it eventually morphed, and left. Hopefully,…
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Letter To My Career Coach
Dear career coach, I did your exercise: “Decide what kind of things I must have,” and I’ve listed below what I want: A job. It took me about a half hour to figure that out. Whew! Then, I wrote an answer to your other question: “What kind of things I’d like to have”: An income…
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Help My Husband Get A Job!
In all women tech communities, there’s always one person who thinks it’s appropriate to advertise for their husband… Two women on the list backchannel DM: One of them composes a reply. Original poster responds: Backchannel DM response to OP’s response: The husband responds:
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The Serious Side of DEI Satire
I wrote a satirical piece on a really bad Diversity Chief hire. Let me highlight what she *should* have done. Including 10 must-haves for diverse engineering teams. 1. DEI executives don’t make sense and cannot be effective if the leadership does not consider DEI important. 2. There is a burden of representation on the one…
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Yeah, that’s what AI brings
Me: I need to cancel my order. StitchFix Chatbot: I’m sorry I didn’t understand that. You can ask: Order problems Delivery problems …. Me: Order problems Chatbot: I’m sorry I didn’t understand that. You can ask: Order problems Delivery problems …. Kaiser Chatbot: Me: I don’t understand why I can’t pay my bill Chatbot: I’m…
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Gendered Language as a Software Engineer
Imagine a (highly generalized) pair programming situation where two engineers, a man and a woman, are talking about specific subjects: When pairing partner makes a mistake Men: That’s not right, I’ll show you. Women: I do it a slightly different way. (explains it) Talking about achievements Men: I wrote the best ruby router gem. Women:…
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Choose Your Adventure: Bright & Shiny Technical Adoption Cycles
You enter into a dark cave. There are two choices: bright and shiny new tech diamond glistening in the offing promising speed of development, simplicity, and money for everyone. The other option is years of decaying code, written in Cobol, supported by the old guy in the corner. Or worse, staying the same. Turn to…
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Are you a rock star engineer?!?
Then we want you! Do you show up at work at 3PM? That’s right, roll on into work with jeans covered in the Burt Reynolds – yes – Cool-Aid and Jaeger. YUM! Do you approach code like a rock star? Do you write your own code in your own language (you made up), writing for…
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BroCon
Hypothetical Talk at BroCon (Not actually BroCon, it was the recent Las Vegas ReactConf, and yes, I should have known 😃 Las Vegas + JavaScript. I did not give this, just an imagining) “How many of you are fathers?” I ask. Half the room raises their hands. “How many of you contribute to open source?”…
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The Job Flux, and Helping Others
Sadly, I was laid off last week. The job flux causes so much stress and anxiety. It’s hard getting back into job hunting- selling yourself, brushing up on skills, the sheer work of it. And, as an introvert I’m just not up to interacting all day long with people. On top of that, it’s the…