beekums

What a great article! Dependency management is always such a pain. It's nice to read about ways to make it easier.

> And whatever you do, don't impose onerous procedures on all of your devs because one of them screws up on a regular basis!

This is a really important point. Creating processes for the lowest common denominator just stifles every other developer.

Agreed. The article mentions influential developers like this who are stuck in the past.

I feel like whiteboarding is really essential when talking about how code should be written, but most whiteboard tests are about writing code on the whiteboard. There's a big difference between the two activities.

This exactly nails the point in the article about checklists and how you can't really create effective quantitative metrics for developers.

I agree with the other comment that you should probably talk to your manager about getting a promotion if you haven't.

Networking is also not an insignificant thing. You may want to take those events your boss takes you to a little more seriously. I shunned networking the first few years of my career to my detriment. I am playing catch up now, but I've found that a strong network can also help you grow in your career... it just may be with a different company.

You want the skills to do a great job, but a network will help you get the opportunities to fulfill your potential.

I wish I was that talented. One of my friends is an incredible artist and I asked her to make those for me.

I'm sorry you hate the avatar! I get lots of mixed feedback about it, but overall the feedback has been positive. I accept that I can't make everyone happy unfortunately.

I am trying to avoid walls of text, but I think it is an unfair statement to say that people don't like to read. People are reading the same amount of text regardless of whether pictures exist or not.

Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the book, but there's one on brain science that discusses how people process text. Letters are still images as far as our eyes and brain are concerned. There's an extra processing step to turn one type of image (letters) into another type of image (what the letters are describing). This is exhausting and throwing in images act as "taking a break" even if that break is only a second or two.

Your point on evidence is dead on. This is an entirely anecdotal piece which is why I titled it "Programming Has Changed My Life" rather than "Programming Can Change Your Life Too".

The latter claim requires a lot more research because it is a huge leap.

Whether I would have developed critical thinking skills naturally can be up to debate. The argument for programming being the factor is because computers are black and white in the early days. Code works or code doesn't work. We don't always get that direct feedback in human interaction.

That's very very true. However, "fair pricing" is mentioned because companies tend to use the term in their marketing explanations for raising prices. In free markets, it is also the responsibility of consumers to understand not only the prices they pay today, but the prices they allow companies to set tomorrow.

Yikes! I just got a new monitor and realized what everyone else in the world was seeing. That WAS terrible. I hope you find the new color scheme less painful.

Your statement is very fair. However, even though there are definitely companies that don't value their programmers, I would be surprised if any of them actually said that in a job description.

How do you tell the difference between a company that does value their engineers from one that doesn't if both companies say the same thing? It is not an easy thing to do for sure, but generic uplifting statements don't solve that problem and don't add to job descriptions.

That is a pretty basic piece of info that companies like to exclude. They tend to just post "competitive salary" when in fact a lot of the ones that state that pay well below market.

I started a CS degree in 2002. Back then there was a worry about programming jobs being around due to out sourcing. Fast forward a few years and it turned out that worry proved to be unnecessary. It turned out that communication was a critical part of software development and that is hard to do with time zone differences.

I think AI will also end up not being a huge concern, even in 20 years. Once you learn more about programming, you'll learn how truly far off we are. One AI researcher pointed out that worrying about something like that is like worrying about overcrowding on Mars when we haven't even sent a person there yet. In the mean time, there is actually a lot of really boring, grinding, work in a programming job. Better AI will take that over more and more which leaves more time for programmers to work on more interesting things!

Were you involved in the hiring process much? If so, you could definitely do well as a recruiter. Hiring is a difficult process for many companies and having a recruiter with a strong engineering background helps create much better funnels for candidates. You will also have a much easier time getting responses from potential candidates because you will be able to say more interesting things about a company's tech in your cold emails instead of the generic copy/paste templates most engineers get in their inbox.

This is something I'm trying to learn how to do as well! Things that I'm in the middle of: - Going to social/entrepreneur mixers and meeting people to talk about my site. The in person aspect of this is also a great way to get feedback on the idea. - Providing frequent updates through my own contacts on social media. - Contacting prominent bloggers in related topics about writing a guest blog post. - If it's fitting, Hacker News!

I would love to hear what other people are doing besides spending a ton of money on ads.

It wasn't clear to me how to autoscale with DO either. That's why I ended up using Google Cloud Engine. It's not exactly cheaper than AWS, but the pricing model for discounts is WAY simpler at least. It also doesn't have the feature set AWS does, but it does have most of what you'll need like a load balancing service.