By Alice Dreger (Photo: xNstAbLe/Shutterstock) A couple of months ago, the sex education notice came home in my nine-year-old son’s backpack. I didn’t realize that, in our district, sex ed starts in the fourth grade. Another sign of the state having more access to my baby than I sometimes wish. When…

It’s 3 PM. The caffeine is kicking in from your afternoon coffee, but you can’t shake the feeling of dread as you drag yourself into your team’s weekly meeting. You know it’s going to carry on forever while simultaneously accomplishing nothing. You wonder, “Does it have to be this way?” Nay, my…

To collaborate with team members who are scattered across the globe, you basically have two options: Use communications technology, like instant messaging or video conferencing, to bridge the gap. Use aviation technology, or other modes of transportation, to meet in a central location and…

For anyone who hasn’t caught on: Remote work is here, it’s happening, and your employees are happier if they are given the option to do it. Whether it’s the ability to work from home some days to a fully scalable, entirely distributed team, the processes needed to accomplish this successfully are…

Speaker: Rich Hickey Conference: Clojure/Conj 2010 - Oct 2010 Hi. As I said yesterday, I swapped the talks around so this is the more philosophical talk. There's multiple titles. I couldn't decide. Some of them were semi-cranky. In those moments. And more [didn't understand]. So this is about step…

Photo: Eamon Queeney, Special To The Chronicle Zecole Thomas and sons Ezekiel, 7 (center), and Joseph, 9, moved out of state after her husband shot himself. Joseph Thomas thought he had it made when he landed a $170,000 job as a software engineer at Uber’s San Francisco headquarters last year. He…

Brian Rea A couple of years ago, it seemed as if everyone I knew was on the verge of divorce. “He’s not the man I married,” one friend told me. “She didn’t change, and I did,” said another. And then there was the no-fault version: “We grew apart.” Emotional and physical abuse are clear-cut grounds…

A Pythonist finds a new home at Clojure land Welcome back to another interview of Not a Monad Tutorial . In this opportunity I decided to interview Facundo Olano, a friend, a teammate, and a developer with a diverse experience . We talked about Python, Node.js, Clojure, Common Lisp and software…

I came to the United States as a six year old kid from Eastern Europe. One of my earliest memories of that time was the Safeway supermarket, an astonishing display of American abundance. It was hard to understand how there could be so much wealth in the world. There was an entire aisle devoted to…

“BOOBER” is the nickname Travis Kalanick, the boss of Uber, used to describe the effect that the ride-hailing startup had on his attractiveness to the opposite sex. Mr Kalanick’s wisecrack seems to have been emblematic of a deeply macho culture. An investigation is under way into allegations from a…

MartianCraft Consulting Training Products About Blog Subscribe by Ben Brooks April 3, 2017 Many of our engineers are embedded with our clients, working along side our client’s engineering staff as one unit — but still representing MartianCraft and the quality and standards of any of our engineers.…

The engineer that gave the unfortunate command to delete our primary database was not only on our minds but also of other people. He's known by the community as "team-member-1", as we refered to him by this expression in our public communications during the incident. After we posted the postmortem…

A few weeks ago, researchers announced SHAttered , the first collision of the SHA-1 hash function. Starting today, all SHA-1 computations on GitHub.com will detect and reject any Git content that shows evidence of being part of a collision attack. This ensures that GitHub cannot be used as a…

And what was the biggest takeaway for managers interviewed? They needed better interview processes to weed out the failures before they got into their teams. To any rational person, this makes no sense. The common denominator isn’t the 46% of employees. It’s the managers . Is the problem really that…

High Cost Tests and High Value Tests Thinking about what your tests can do both for you and to you You probably don’t need an actual ledger to measure the costs and benefits of your tests (This is a sidebar to an email course called Noel Rappin’s Testing Journal that you can sign up for here . It…

Illustration by Tom McCarten I n January 1991, a couple of crazy kids got married. That these particular “kids” were in their late 30s, were astronauts, and were keeping their marriage a secret from their bosses at NASA only added to the romance. Mark Lee and Jan Davis met during training for a…

I usually stretch a Tinder chat over days or even weeks, warily circling a guy to make sure he seems like a decent human. But on that sticky summer night, Bob* put me at ease right away. He was in an open relationship, just like me. He talked frankly and respectfully about sex. He said he was a…

Brian Rea I have been trying to write this for a while, but the morphine and lack of juicy cheeseburgers (what has it been now, five weeks without real food?) have drained my energy and interfered with whatever prose prowess remains. Additionally, the intermittent micronaps that keep whisking me…

The idea that TDD damages design and architecture is not new. DHH suggested as much several years ago with his notion of Test Induced Design Damage ; in which he compares the design he prefers to a design created by Jim Weirich that is “testable”. The argument, boils down to separation and…

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt speaks in Washington, Feb. 21. (Susan Walsh/AP) President Trump’s announcement that he would appoint Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency set off alarm bells among those who track climate…

Working While Female A Twitter thread has gotten some attention recently, where my former-coworker / current-best friend, Marty, recounted the day he realized just how bad, and insidious, workplace sexism could be. After noticing that a client was treating him like crap while his email signature was…

Robert Mercer in New York in 2014.Photograph: DDP USA/Rex Shutterstock J ust over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars . “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” CNN was described…

In 2011, I was hired, straight out of college, to work at the White House and eventually the National Security Council. My job there was to promote and protect the best of what my country stands for. I am a hijab-wearing Muslim woman––I was the only hijabi in the West Wing––and the Obama…

Click the image above for a larger version of the illustration . This is Part 3 of a 5-part series on 5 Disruptions to Marketing (you can start with Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already): Digital transformation redefines “marketing” beyond the marketing department. Microservices & APIs (and open…

It’s 2021, and President Donald Trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances. Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for…

Case study: How complexity creeps in Seemingly inconsequential decisions can open the door to significant organizational and operational complexity Lately we’ve been on a bit of a tear internally working to eliminate operational complexity from our business. Complexity is like addiction… It comes on…

Bakery (source: Desprierres via Pixabay ). Gregory Brown's book about the non-code aspects of software development, Programming Beyond Practices , is now available. Software development often reminds me of the “peanut butter and jelly sandwich” exercise. This is where two people sit back to back:…

Ever since Donald Trump handed down his executive order temporarily halting all immigration from seven majority-Muslim nations for three months and barring refugees from Syria indefinitely, the social-media outpouring from liberals has focused, understandably, on how unfair the policy is to Muslims.…

Data outlives code, and a valuable database supports many applications over time. These ten rules will help grow your database schema without breaking your applications. 1. Prod is not like dev. Production is not development. In production, one or more codebases depend on your data, and these ten…

My man Stephen Tobolowsky lays down the conjoined triangles. “This actually makes me feel less confident about my role here. If we can’t define what we think senior is, how am I supposed to know if I’m working toward it?” At Frontside, we gather every Tuesday afternoon for our company meeting, where…

T he eternal human struggle to live meaningfully in the face of inevitable death entered its newest phase one Monday in the summer of 2007, when employees of Google gathered to hear a talk by a writer and self-avowed geek named Merlin Mann. Their biggest professional problem was email, the digital…

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by…

Rush Limbaugh in 2012. On his radio show, Mr. Limbaugh accused the mainstream media of spreading fake news, saying, “They just make it up.” Julie Smith/Associated Press WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. , the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the…

How Self-Help Really Works At the beginning of last year, I inadvertently found myself listening to an interview with self-help guru Tony Robbins. That interview made me curious, and pretty soon I had listened to several interviews, a 20-hour full-length audiobook, and a course or two that this…

A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall…

Donald Trump hasn’t been sworn in yet, but he is already making decisions and issuing statements to world leaders that radically depart from American foreign policy, all to the benefit of his family’s corporate empire. Because of this, the next president of the United States is already vulnerable to…

In phone calls, meetings and cables, America’s European allies have expressed alarm to one another about Donald Trump’s public statements denying Moscow’s role in cyberattacks designed to interfere with the U.S. election . They fear the Republican nominee for president has emboldened the Kremlin in…

Update (30 Oct 2016): since I wrote this post, a bug was found in the benchmark which caused Rollup to appear slightly better than it would otherwise. However, the overall results are not substantially different (Rollup still beats Browserify and Webpack, although it’s not quite as good as Closure…

Right now, many of us are grappling with how to use our skills and influence to resist the upcoming Trump administration and the hatred and violence that it inspires. We are preparing for a crucial part of the next few months or years: changing the minds of people who support the Trump…

Question for graphic designers: When’s the last time you used an X-Acto knife and glue to create a physical paste-up that you presented to a client in person? For today’s pros, getting down to business means tons of time spent at the computer, then sending files back and forth; but it wasn’t all…