Posts

A deep look into how a CTO uses feedback and goals to create the structure necessary for employee growth.

Through years of trial and error giving feedback, I finally uncovered the principles that allow me to both fulfill my role and feel supportive of my employees.

You can and you will successfully hire a great engineer and emerge a hero! It all starts with one little secret 😉

The tools we use both limit and advance our thinking. When we accurately anticipate the future, our progress accelerates because each step is built on top of a previous enabling idea instead of starting from scratch each time.

Art is powerful because it connects us with our deepest selves, and through the details we choose to include or omit, they have a point of view. Abstractions similarly afford us limitless opportunity to explore, build, learn, and communicate.

Coding is fun! But learning to code is a significant investment of time and maybe money. Naturally, you want to know what you’re going to get out of it.

I’ve been setting up Review Apps on Heroku to streamline our product process. Review apps let you automatically spin up new app intance for every github pull request, creating isolated testing environments for each feature. Pretty neat! …in theory. In practice I hit some hurdles. For example, our app relies on shared third party resources and a large postgres data set. In this post I’ll explain how we handle elasticsearch and postgres in our review apps at Ascent.

A practical comparison of React and Angular 2, as we select a front-end framework for the Ascent app. Why A Front-End Framework? Our javascript is well-organized so far, but consists only of jQuery and plain javascript. This works great for small one-off scripts, but makes it difficult to create larger more complex applications. We have some intensive front-end projects coming up that will require a more robust front-end framework to guide our work and encourage consistency.

The Blind Leading The Blind I have a number of recent example of people starting tech careers 5 years into a different career. They’re already SO strong on the non-code aspects of programming - partly I’m sure because of their personalities but also because they’ve had some time to figure out how to be an adult with a job. Problem solving, teamwork, self-teaching, communication, attention to detail, organization, etc. These people are invaluable team members long before their technical contributions justify their salaries.

I randomly started getting this heroku error today: ~$ heroku --version ERROR: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference ! error getting commands pid 1923 exit 1 It was happening for every heroku command; heroku login, heroku releases, heroku run console, heroku logs. Doing a full uninstall and reinstall of the heroku toolbelt fixed the problem for me.