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The Human Dimension of Software Engineering

The Human Dimension of Software Engineering

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6 Career Ratholes to Avoid in Software Engineering

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Reading Time: 6 minutes

There are virtually infinite paths you can take to have a successful and fulfilling career in the software industry. Then again, many roads can lead to long-term issues and career ratholes.

The world of tech forgives compared to other fields. Just think of the areas of law, medicine, and politics for example, where a weak reputation can follow you around and be a disaster hard to recover from. In tech, you might not risk being blackballed from the industry or losing a professional license. However, you can still waste years of growth by getting stuck in the wrong place or walking the wrong path. ... 

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7 Strategies to Avoid Software Growth Zero, AKA Drowning in Maintenance

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Reading Time: 7 minutes

The Software Garden

Software is like a garden. Both software and gardens require a lot of work, craftsmanship, and artistry to envision and create, especially when starting from scratch. They both evolve, and they both need constant maintenance, even if you don’t make any significant improvement.

If you are a reader of my blog, you know that I use a character called Bolbo as my mental framework for the quintessentialsoftware developer. You might remember that he has a square jaw, messy black hair, round glasses, a cynical sense of humor and a snarky attitude. I wrote about him in “A day in the life of a software engineer.” In this post, I will talk to you about Bolbo’s brother Polbo, who is a gardener. I will tell you about his journey in the creation of a formal garden. ... 

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How to Lead Change, a Primer

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Reading Time: 7 minutes

On Change

Leo Tolstoy famously said, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Tolstoy’s words are true today as much as they were true in his time. Life in the 1800s was very different, but people were not.

Today’s tech industry, populated by smart people pushing hard to innovate one line of code at the time, is no exception. Intelligence comes with strong opinions and personalities. If you’ve worked in teams for a while, at some point, you probably wished that somebody could be more pleasant or reasonable. ... 

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10 Top Reasons To Have a Career in Tech

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Reading Time: 8 minutes

If you’re exploring new professional opportunities, a career in tech may have caught your attention as a potential avenue. Even if you already have one, you might have reached a point where you wonder if it was the right decision.

Having been in the software industry for 30+ years, I firmly believe that a career in tech, and especially programming and software engineering, is not only accessible to everyone, but it also represents a brilliant path to take in life. I am going to give you my top 10 reasons for this sentiment. ... 

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Choosing The Proper Level of Abstraction

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Reading Time: 8 minutes

Models of Reality & Level of Abstraction

The physical world and the rules that regulate it are complicated and very difficult to grasp. To make sense of it, we — humans — attempt to explain it with mental models. Models are logical constructions defined with terms that we created and understand. We use those models as proxies for reality in an attempt to grasp and predict its complicated and multifaceted rules.

Models are not an engineering-only concept; they are fundamental to everyday life and are natural simplifications of the world that we experience. We build models for everything, every day. For example, the memory we have of someone we met is a model of that person that we constructed in our mind. It is a description that is simple enough to store away in our memory, and sophisticated enough to be nuanced. ... 

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