Experience or institutional knowledge?

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These 2 things are often confused in our industry: experience and institutional knowledge. Too often I see companies evaluating engineers based on the fact they know where to go and make changes quickly and put out fires, rather than looking at the impact long term an individual has, on the platform, on its stability, on […]

Working with senior engineers

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This is another topic that I often get asked about when I advise companies. It often comes packaged in the format “what do I need to do to attract more senior engineers?” but the core of it is the same: how do you work with senior engineers? As an engineer myself and having worked throughout […]

computer code

Polyglot or poly-framework?

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Our Universe is expanding every day — and I mean this in the sense of our “programming universe” (though the other, ad literam interpretation is true as well, since our actual physical Universe is expanding indeed). Every meetup and every website I come across advocates a new framework, a new architecture, a new language, a […]

What makes a good CTO?

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I have been a CTO myself a few times and worked for some of the greats (and learned!) so I get asked often about what are the traits of a good CTO, be it by the companies I’m advising privately and also through Endeavor mentorship sessions. If you are a co-founder looking for a CTO […]

Adding Apache Commons CLI to your Java Project

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I’ve spent enough time dealing with Java programs to see enough ETL’s and other sorts of command-line based apps implemented in Java. And with these sort of programs came with the realization that more often than not developers opt for the “easy” way out and end up implementing command-line parsing by themselves. This seem to […]