Tag Archives: work

Paying a Fair Wage Is the Opposite of Slavery

I just found out about Alex St. John’s ridiculous article on VentureBeat claiming that developers who object to working uncompensated overtime have “a wage-slave attitude”. Ummm, what? It sounds like he’s trying to use emotional terms and “snarl words” to make people think that “whatever a ‘wage slave attitude’ is, it must be bad!” But look […]

The Place Where Flow Goes to Die

My employer has multiple offices in different places, so people who I’ve worked “with” for months can still be newcomers to my physical work environment. A visiting co-worker recently said, “From your Twitter feed, I assumed this office would be, like, the loudest place ever.” Am I really that sensitive? I started wondering. I started keeping […]

Why I Don’t Mind Coding Tests

I keep hearing about developers who, when interviewing for potential jobs, consider coding tests to be “a waste of time”, “insulting”, or “beneath me”. The logic seems to be: Once you’ve risen to the level of Senior Developer (or some similar title), people should realize that yes, you really do know how to write simple […]

The Evolution of WordPress

For backward-compatibility testing, I’ve just installed a few versions of WordPress ranging back to version 2.0. It’s kind of fascinating to see a sort of fast-rewind retrospective of the software. Even just looking at the installation experience, it’s like watching HAL 9000 descend into childish incoherence as Dave Bowman yanks his memory chips. By the time you […]

What Characters Are Allowed in Twitter Usernames

A while back, when I was writing Hummingbird, I needed to look for Twitter usernames in various strings. More recently, I’m doing some work that involves Twitter at my new job. Once again, I need to find and match on Twitter usernames. Luckily, this time, Twitter seems to have updated its signup page with some […]