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What Makes A Senior Software Developer?

https://blog.professorbeekums.com/2016/12/what-makes-senior-software-developer.html

What Makes A Senior Software Developer? This post has a follow up. Most engineering organizations will have to answer the question: What makes a software developer a senior developer? This is a challenging question because it is extremely subjective. Search for the answer on the internet and you will get many different answers. Some will contain criteria that are also subjective themselves which adds additional difficulty to the question. Oh this other company is offering you 20% more money? Time for a p...

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Hiring Software Developers When You Are Not One

https://blog.professorbeekums.com/2016/11/hiring-software-developers-when-you-are.html

Hiring Software Developers When You Are Not One. Hiring software developers is hard. It’s hard when you are a software developer and have intimate knowledge of the skillset required. It is even harder when you don’t have that skillset. I’ve met many entrepreneurs who are in the latter situation. How do these folks go about hiring developers for contract or full time? So how can you judge a developer’s actual ability to build great software when you yourself are not a developer? These steps won’t ensure a...

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Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

https://blog.professorbeekums.com/2017/01/software-developers-should-have.html

Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience. Being a software developer and being a system administrator are very different things. Many folks lump the two professions together, but the skillsets do not overlap much. Software developers write code. System administrators maintain the computer systems that the code runs on. Both are critical. Software provides value to users such as yourself, but software can’t exist without an environment to run on. For example, think of a website where you upload...

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Code Reviews Are Awesome... Sometimes

https://blog.professorbeekums.com/2016/11/code-reviews-are-awesome-sometimes.html

Code Reviews Are Awesome. Sometimes. Code reviews are seen as an essential part of software development. It makes a lot of sense to say that a programmer should have their work reviewed by another programmer. Authors and journalists have their work reviewed by an editor after all. Humans make mistakes and creators especially get a little tunnel vision when they are focused on making their creations. Having someone else look at it can catch many errors. Software is a branching system:. Unfortunately that ...

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Follow Up On "What Makes A Senior Software Developer"

https://blog.professorbeekums.com/2017/01/follow-up-on-what-makes-senior-software.html

Follow Up On "What Makes A Senior Software Developer". A few readers asked me to do a follow up with the responses people sent in for what they thought made a developer a senior developer. I compiled all the emails I received with the comments on Hacker News. Many folks had their own version of the checklist with different items on their respective lists. I found one to be very interesting though. I was sent a link to a post on this exact topic. Another interesting concept suggested was that software dev...

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Should You Hire a Bootcamp Graduate?

https://blog.professorbeekums.com/2016/12/should-you-hire-bootcamp-graduate.html

Should You Hire a Bootcamp Graduate? Photo courtesy of Dev Bootcamp. The point of contention is: can someone be as qualified after going to a 6 month bootcamp than someone who spends 4 years in college? Many do not think so. An in-house recruiter I worked with often asked our organization to keep an open mind about bootcamp graduates. This was because other members on the team would rule out applicants solely because they had attended a bootcamp. They sell the dream and make it sound like it will be easy.

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Switching Costs in Software Development

https://blog.professorbeekums.com/2016/09/switching-costs-in-software-development.html

Switching Costs in Software Development. Photo courtesy of Luke Price. That’s an interesting theory, but will it actually happen? Then one day, Scaling R Us decided to raise their fees. By a lot. Instead of a flat fee, they made it 50% of what AWS was charging! For us, that meant paying tens of thousands of dollars instead of $2500. Can you imagine if you cell phone bill went from $80 a month to $3000 a month and you couldn’t switch? Can we still pay our employees? Both have priced competitively with eac...

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Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

https://blog.professorbeekums.com/2016/12/beware-of-developers-who-do-negative.html

Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work. This post has an important follow-up. At some point in every software developer’s career, we work with someone who does negative work. The notion of negative work may sound a little strange. Someone can do no work by just not working. How does negative. The end result was a few dozen hours wasted across the entire team. This developer did zero work AND reduced the productivity of others. There are many other examples of this. I’ve encountered many developers who...

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Balancing The Desire To Under-Engineer and Over-Engineer

https://blog.professorbeekums.com/2016/11/balancing-desire-to-under-engineer-and.html

Balancing The Desire To Under-Engineer and Over-Engineer. The challenge is: how can we get just the right amount of planning done? Cities don’t start off as cities. They start off as a series of houses. The people who built those houses only planned to have those houses. If no one else moves into the area, then those just end up being the only houses there. No overinvestment in planning. Alternatively, many developers opt for what is called a monolith. That means all the systems are tied together&#46...