Love your bugs

I often hear junior engineers or newcomers to a company say that they’re not getting enough feedback. It’s a common feeling, especially for people who are just leaving school and the predictable assignment->work->grade feedback loop that it creates. There’s lots of good advice for managers, mentors, and senior engineers about giving specific,...

My 2015 was a year of recovering from a serious injury and becoming a better engineer. I also gave four talks and published a chapter I’ve been working on for a while. I’m hopeful that 2016 will bring as many opportunities for growth and fewer broken bones. TPF I broke my knee – a tibial plateau fracture – at the beginning of February, 2015. It...

In early September I gave a keynote at Kiwi PyCon in New Zealand on effective learning for programmers. There were two pieces to the talk: one about mindset, and one about particular strategies we can use. The text below is an aspirational and lightly edited transcript of the mindset piece of that talk. There’s also a video available if you’d...

I spend a lot of time flipping back and forth between Python 2.x and 3.x: I use different versions for different projects, talk to people about different versions, explore differences between the two, and paste the output of REPL sessions into chat windows. I also like to keep long-running REPL sessions. These two activities in combination...

Big news for me: I’m leaving Hacker School and going to work for Dropbox in San Francisco, joining Jessica McKellar’s team. I met Jessica when she was part of the first round of residents at Hacker School in fall 2012, and I’ve had tremendous respect for her work and leadership ever since. Dropbox has an impressive crop of Pythonistas...