Three years ago, my friend Robert Harris and I made a toy project to help some of our friends who were teaching in the humanities. They wanted ways to help their students understand who was connected to who. Being data visualization nerds, we wanted that too! We added connection lines and put people on a timeline in order to visually sift through who influenced who, and who were contemporaries.
As software engineers, we look for best practices throughout the whole software life cycle. We are constantly engaged in research and rethinking as we investigate new technologies and find tighter ways to factor complexity. However, developing better projects faster isn’t just about improving your tools; it’s also about improving your developers. Therefore, we do our best to understand developer work and keep track of research that helps us to understand the coding process as a human process, a series of practices, and a discipline of the body and mind. Yet how do we know what we know?
Over several years of working at Cloud City Development, I’ve seen a consistent demand crop up repeatedly amongst our clients' companies: How can a team of software engineers hire aggressively to meet future needs, while still having time to meet current needs? How can developers (or their managers) find the expertise that they need to evaluate candidates, when it is precisely that very expertise that is needed for them to do so?
Microaggressions appear to be small slights, but substantially contribute to a hostile work environment. From the outside, they look innocuous enough; more like clumsy misunderstandings, but a persistent pattern of them can wield tremendous damage to teams.
Humans are tool using creatures. When we want to drive in a nail, we use a hammer. When we want to dig a small hole, we use a shovel. When we want to connect something into a power outlet, we use a plug. Since there’s only one kind of hammer, shovel, or plug, it’s always easy to find the correct thing, right? Well, no, there are claw hammers, ball peen hammers, spades, shovels, 120V two-pronged and 3 pronged plugs, and those 220V plugs they use in Europe that I can never keep straight.
Happily, software systems and packages don’t suffer from these incompatible interface problems, right? Of course they do. Maintaining the ability for a system or package to operate correctly against different versions and environments can be quite challenging. And testing against all of the supported versions can drive one to distraction and convince maintainers to limit supported versions to what they can deal with.
