To The Point
Today I finally came up with a layperson’s descriptor of the CTO role that I’m happy with:
Responsible for making sure we build things right, but more importantly, that we build the right things.
Yup, that sums it up nicely.
Distant Well-Wishers
Of all the sources of happy birthday messages (which are truly delightful, by the way), one I least expected was a text from the customer service agent at CoveredCA that I worked with to get health insurance after I was laid off nearly 5 years ago, and haven’t interacted with since.
I get that it’s trivially easy for any organization that knows your date of birth to send out such messages, but…
That’s gotta be some kind of automated message, right? Or a mistake? In any case, thanks for “thinking of me” on my special day!
Discount Double Check
Today’s cautionary reminder to know your audience is something of a sequel to Left Hand, Meet Right Hand. It involves a cold email from a recruiter I got two days ago. Which isn’t a rare occurrence by any means, but what was out of the ordinary was that 1) it was from my former employer, despite there being absolutely no indication the sender realized I was a recent ex-Amazonian, and 2) the jobs being offered were at or below the level I’d been hired at back in 2019, a full five years ago. Needless to say, I’m not interested (and I’m not just saying that because my current boss sometimes reads this blog).
Look, I recognize that this email was probably auto-generated from a LinkedIn search, but it’s a recruiter’s entire job to not only find, but adequately entice, qualified candidates. The poor person was hoist on their own petard with the boilerplate about “raising the bar” and “becoming an industry leader.” Failing to do even a modicum of homework is not frugal nor customer obsessed.
It’s not like it would be that hard. Even if the automation was solely LinkedIn based, my entire work history is right there and it’s pretty obvious I haven’t been a mid-level software engineer in ten years. But an Amazon employee could easily do even better, given that there’s robust internal tooling for querying data on current and past employees. I should know, because I wrote some of it. In fact, from memory I bet I could write a Python script that could cross check a list of potential job candidates against Amazon’s employee lists.
Thanks for the chuckle, my recruiter friend. But do better. Open up your browser, go to https://<redacted_wiki_domain>.com/view/Jud_Neer and you’ll find all the resources and documentation you need to avoid this error in the future.
Run It Back
I’m a creature of habit with a particular love of regular daily routines. Thus starting back to work after holiday is one of my favorite times of year. 2024 is shaping up to be a season of change, though not until summertime, so for a few months at least I’m looking forward to normalcy.
I’m also not superstitious, so I don’t mind saying the above despite things turning out quite differently the last time I posted a similar sentiment.
Little Things
One of my favorite tools is ngrok (pronounced en-grok, presumably referencing Stranger in a Strange Land, a book I read as a freshman in high school when I was far too young to appreciate it). If you need to get a locally-running service on the Internet, ngrok can do it in seconds with a single command. I use it all the time when experimenting with and debugging APIs, such as this weekend’s foray into LangChain.
Supposedly it can do a bang-up job of fronting production services also, but I’ve never tried it for that use case. Perhaps someday? In any case, I’m truly grateful it exists.
Gone In 60 Seconds
If I had one minute to evaluate a job interviewee, I’d put a piece of writing in front of them (either code for a developer or prose for a less technical person) and watch them type it into an editor in real-time. If they are able to do so quickly and with few errors (for some values of quick and few), they pass.
This is completely unfair, and heavily biased towards certain privileges; many otherwise excellent candidates would be missed. But as a first-order approximation, I’d be willing to wager it works more often than not.
Fix-It-Up Chappie
Over the weekend my daughter’s Chromebook stopped turning on. We’ve gotten our money’s worth, having bought it right before the pandemic (fortunate timing, that), but I suspected the issue was only with the battery, having experienced a similar failure mode with other Chromebooks. Fifty bucks, overnight shipping, and fifteen minutes at the kitchen table, and it’s back up and running. Yay!
I usually enjoy trying to repair things. I don’t always succeed (especially if it’s car-related, I leave that to the professionals after a disastrous attempt to patch a radiator leak in an ’87 Honda Civic back in the summer of 2005), but stuff like electronics or minor carpentry things I can usually figure out (not to mention identifying and working around website bugs). There’s something imminently satisfying about learning something new and immediately applying it to bring a tiny bit of order to the entropy.
You may think you don’t know how. And you may be right. But finish the sentence: you don’t know how yet. More than ever before there’s a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. Engage your curiosity and give it a try. The risk is (usually) minimal and the rewards many.
A Matter of Perspective
In the past several months I’ve been making efforts to do more networking with technologists. One avenue to do that has been joining a couple Slack workspaces (Rands Leadership and All Tech Is Human, specifically). A few days back a conversation topic was the difference between unit tests and integration tests; a topic on which I definitely have opinions.
As part of the discussion I came up with the following distinction, which I liked enough to codify here for posterity:
- Unit Test: Tests one “thing” (function, module, service, system) in isolation
- Integration Test: Tests multiple “things” (functions, modules, services, systems) in combination
Inherent to this definition is some ambiguity, because a single “thing” at one level is multiple “things” at another level. What matters definitionally is the spirit of a test: is it trying to test one thing or multiple things. If the former, it’s a unit test. Otherwise it’s an integration test.
For what it’s worth, I’m a much bigger fan of the test diamond than the test pyramid. The ratio of “amount of stuff tested” to “effort required to write tests” is so much higher when writing integration tests. And they (typically) test at the “actual business functionality” level, vs at the “does this code do the thing” level. And value is all that matters.
On a tangential note, I developed another type of test diamond a couple years back. It was initially designed when evaluating taco shops along Poway Road in San Diego, but it’s applicable to just about anything you want to rate. I leave the interpretation of the diagram as an exercise for the reader (the ambiguity is a feature, not a bug).
Just No
Can we all agree that “drinking from a fire hose” is a terrible metaphor for the feeling of starting a new job? It’s overused, cliched, and kinda gross.
What I find most funny is that it’s usually stated as a humble brag about the amount of information you can ingest in short order, or to indicate that your new company is some kind of special unicorn doing work so incredibly complex that it overwhelms all who dare join it.
Reality is that the feeling of being overwhelmed in a new role is totally normal, even if the work is banal or the company is pedestrian. Sure, it takes time, but don’t make it sound harder than it is.
Home Cooking
Decent lighting is essential when wanting to exude professionalism in a video call. But sometimes you either don’t have equipment at hand or don’t want to mess with it. As a stopgap, I’ve discovered that if I open up a few browser windows with light backgrounds they can help illuminate my face, but the results are a bit bluer than I’d otherwise prefer.
It got me thinking if I could build a simple website that would be nothing but an adjustable color background. Behold, the webcam light tool. Not only is the color adjustable via HSL (hue, saturation, lightness) sliders, there’s also a slider in Kelvin if you want to pick a color temperature instead. Color values are saved to browser local storage and remember on subsequent visits, and automatically synchronize in real-time if you open multiple windows.
With a pair of tall and narrow windows, one on either edge of my ultrawide monitor, the results are pretty good. Chalk one up for creative solutions!