Thoughts on dev management, design, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Personal motto: wishful thinking kills.
Somewhere in Oregon
Joined March 2012
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Just when I thought life couldn't possibly get any better. Looking forward to the forthcoming AWS record label, cookbook, and lifestyle magazine "At Work With Werner".
PSA to anyone developing a system to send 6- or 7-digit 2FA codes via SMS: hyphens exist. In a more civilized age, they were used to chunk long strings of digits like phone numbers and SSNs to make it easier for humans to dial/copy them. And yes, you can fit it in. #uxdesign
It appears that a downside of being a hugely successful monopoly is that you lose the clear-sightedness and doggedness that are often required to win in business. #GoogleStadia has discovered that there are other gaming platforms out there, which gamers and devs prefer. Who knew?
One of my favorite pieces of advice to give youngish engineers who like to "solve problems" is to not look down on other functions such as design, marketing, and sales without understanding how they're crucial to actually solving the (customer's) problem.
This entails the customer knowing about the product (marketing), knowing how it will help them (marketing), deciding to use it instead of the competition (marketing & sales), implementing it (sales/customer success), and being successful with it and sticking with it (design).
Exciting to see Texas and Florida collaborate to show us what can be accomplished just by abandoning human decency. Nothing reflects the "American can-do spirit" like deceiving desperate people into getting on a plane and making them someone else's problem for PR. #innovation
I think "empathy" has a branding problem: when many devs hear the word in a professional context – especially from someone wearing a scarf in the office – they start rolling their eyes. But of course empathy just means knowing the "deep why" behind user reqs and buying decisions.
Got this pitch in a cold email. To paraphrase Triumph the insult-comic dog: AI performance reviews sounds like a great feature – if I want my whole team to resign!
Today's edition of cringeworthy and inexplicable captioning mistakes, courtesy of @business
6/ Culture is a dominant force for good or ill wherever you have groups of humans, and software dev is no exception. Culture is what you do, not what you say you do, and it flows from the top whether you're aware of it or not; your team learns from your actions what's ok.
7/ Many developers loathe management because they've only seen it done poorly by people who aren't doing it for the love of the job, aren't trying their hardest, and may in fact hate it. But non-dev managers often struggle to lead developers effectively.