If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.  The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works.  It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “f...

Consider this user interface for a car:The goal of these interfaces is to make you operate something, and operate it efficiently and safely. The grooves and clicks and limits constrain the range of motion and the number of choices. The visual look heavily hints at how to actively use it. They are usually not hard to learn. More importantly, the learning curve plateaus. Once you learn how to drive a car, there’s not much progression after that. Boundedness is an important property of these interfaces, by design.Now look at this “user interface” f...

1. Inability to reason about codeReasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path ("running the program in your head") while knowing what the goal of the code is.SymptomsThe presence of "voodoo code", or code that has no effect on the goal of the program but is diligently maintained anyway (such as initializing variables that are never used, calling functions that are irrelevant to the goal, producing output that is not used, etc.)Executing idempotent functions multiple times (eg: calling the save() function multiple times "just to be sure")Fixing bugs by writing code that ov...

Since I'm seeing so many hits for this page, and since most of you are developers, I thought it might be worth trying to do a little blatant recruiting If you are an exceptional, passionate front end developer (HTML, CSS, JS) and you want to work in an awesome SCRUM team at a huge multinational company in the South of the Netherlands, please drop me a line (DM my Twitter account).There are also opportunities for developers (front and/or back end) and UNIX gurus at another brilliant company (Competa) in the Randstad. Basically, if you love tech and you're looking for work in Holland, ...

I’ve been getting some emails from young developers wanting to “level up” as programmers. I’m definitely not the first to write about this topic, so I’m not sure how much I have to add. Still, for what it’s worth here are a few points off the top of my head:Work with other developers. We are at a wonderful time in the history of technology when for the first time, it doesn’t really matter where you are or who you are working for. So long as you have a decent internet connection, you can pair up with another developer anywhere in the world and work...

How do you answer the question, “what do I need to learn to be a good programmer?” I have written posts trying to answer that question, typically focusing on the languages that you should learn or the algorithms and other techniques you need to know. What about the rest of a programmer’s life? This is a less serious look at the life of a programmer. So, what does a programmer really need to know?Caffeine â€“ You need to find your preferred caffeine delivery system. Mine is black coffee, early and often. Others may prefer diet soda throughout the day. There are alwa...

I got an email request to publish this article a few days ago.I was actually on the verge of moving the email to the trash when I noticed the first name of the author: Rand.For those of you not familiar with the Wheel of Time series, the main character’s name is Rand.I admit that it’s an embarrassing weak reason to respond to a strange email, but reading some 10,000 pages of a fantasy series obviously messes with your mind.Then again, it’s probably no stranger than Rand Mendoza wanting to publish his article on this blog to begin with.Anyways, enjoy…**...

Justin Kan and Emmett Shear watched their first startup, an online calendar called Kiko, implode when Google decided to do the same thing in 2006. They sold Kiko's scraps on eBay for $258,000 and wondered what to do with their lives. So the pair did the only thing they could think of: They went to see Paul Graham at his house in Cambridge, Mass., near Harvard Square. Graham sat them down and helped bang out a plan to create Justin.tv, now the Web's biggest portal for live video, with 31 million users a month and staked with $7.2 million of venture capital.Justin.tv is hardly the first, nor the...