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A Decade of Remote Work

A Decade of Remote Work

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Looking to learn more? While you’re here, I’m thinking about writing a book on this topic. Sign up here for updates. Intro While still in college (go Broncos!), I teamed up with Alex (@slevenbits) to create a startup. We were young, inexperienced and naive. Our first project was called YippieMail and it was an email aggregator. Simply put, YippieMail could display all your webmail accounts (i.e. Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail etc) in the same web interface (this was before most email providers supported IMAP, so you couldn’t use an email client). Looking back at it, YippieMail was a pretty stupid idea, but it did land us meetings with Sequoia Capital and few other VCs on Sand Hill R... »

HTML is the Web

HTML is the Web

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What’s the story with Frontend Engineers and HTML these days? I’ve been speaking to quite a few recently who just don’t seem to understand it. I mean, they understand some of it. They understand what a div is and what a span is, and as long as it all looks good and works when they click on it, they’re happy enough. So many that I’ve spoken to have answered questions about HTML with things like “Oh, I do everything in React or Vue these days”. But really, it doesn’t matter if all you write is Javascript, because if you’re making websites then the most important thing you’re making is HTML. HTML is the Web It’s all about what gets consumed by the consumer. It’s the UI and UX. It’s the whole pa... »

Danny Glasser is typing…

Danny Glasser is typing…

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During my Microsoft career I had the opportunity to work on a number of projects that resulted in patents for which I am listed as an inventor. Setting aside the issues surrounding software patents and patent trolling in general, what pride I possess in any patent attached to my name has almost nothing to do with the patent itself, the filing and granting of which are largely the work of attorneys. The pride comes from utility of the work that spurred the patent application and my personal contributions to that work. I care little about the several patents where I am listed as a co-inventor along with Bill Gates — for example, 8,341,405: Access management in an off-premise environment — desp... »

Are Google software engineers really doing…

Are Google software engineers really doing…

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I’ve been developing SW at google for 15 years now, though mostly not with the job title of “software engineer” but rather as a senior tech manager (“uber tech lead”, was the monicker for that) or as a senior-staff “technical solutions engineer” (whatever that may mean: it changes by the group/team/area, and by the year). I would say that maybe 1/10th of my coding time over these 15 years was “extraordinary” — inventing and deploying stuff such as provably-auditable data access, getting 10x the performance of an existing system by drastically different architectures, fully automating platform-migration tasks which had taken 100s of hours of toil from highly skilled pros down to single-digit ... »

The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job

The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job

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In 2016, an anonymous confession appeared on Reddit: “From around six years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work.” As far as office confessions go, that might seem pretty tepid. But this coder, posting as FiletOFish1066, said he worked for a well-known tech company, and he really meant nothing. He wrote that within eight months of arriving on the quality-assurance job, he had fully automated his entire workload. “I am not joking. For 40 hours each week, I go to work, play League of Legends in my office, browse Reddit, and do whatever I feel like. In the past six years, I have maybe done 50 hours of real work.” When his bosses realized that he’d worked less in half a d... »