One of my life’s traumas is the bug trackers, the issue trackers, the project management tools. The toolset that completes the version control log to form the development equivalent of double-entry bookkeeping. As with its accounting equivalent, those tools are actually useful indeed. While we collectively learned to avoid the CEO MBAs that run a company only based on its accounting books and disregard the underlying business. I think we haven’t learned to avoid managers who only run software development through tickets and disregard the underlying software delivery. Read more

I did another live coding as an episode 5 of The Graveyard of Tie Guan Yin. Topics covered: Deploying a an existing Django project to Heroku and its configuration Converting Django project with file-based settings.py to accept environment variables Attempting to connect the project to database hosted in RDS The Graveyard of Tie Guan Yin is a webcast series where I drink tea and refactor my old Czech website (that is due for its 20th anniversary next year) into an open-source project. Read more

At the heart of a lot of workplace problems I encountered is a very fundamental and culturally specific issue: we don’t have a shared idea of what employment is. Everyone vaguely agrees on basic differences between full and part-time workers, entrepreneurs, contractors and interns yet again, the devil is in the details. If you are buying a service, you pick one: Paying fordelivery, be it a haircut or a cooked meal Paying per hour with maybe a rough initial estimate, but only knowing a final price afterward. Read more

Tl;dr: Copy & Paste the script and source it into your shell. But since this is about handling your secrets, you should know what is it doing and why. Passwords secure your digital identity and everybody knows to keep them save. As its usage skyrocketed, more sophisticated users use password manager as the trade-off seems to favor completely unique passwords over the possible compromitation of the manager1. Yet the computers that belong to the sophisticated users—developers—are often littered with passwords stored in clear text. Read more

There is one distinct thing that stands between successful startups and failures. This is based on my own experience, listening to the inside stories from the Valley, talking to multiple startup founders as well as to a few of FAANG early employees. It is the only advice I am comfortable giving that I am confident will increase your odds significantly and outweighs every other factor I am aware of: Be lucky. Read more

Going through a day spent in meetings is easy to underestimate. For those who never did it, it’s just a day spent talking. For makers who were forced to go through it, it’s easy to trash: “the best way to solve this problem is to never have it” or “this meeting should have been an email”. But crises do occur. High-volume, low-latency, space-distributed decision making is needed. There is a difference between spending a day in the meeting room with other people and having group calls—with video or without, timezone-distributed or not. Read more