My company, Ember, is hiring for embedded software engineers and QA engineers in Boston: http://www.ember.com/company_careers.html We develop the chips, software, and tools for wireless sensor networks. I’ve worked at Ember since December, and it’s the best place I’ve ever worked (and I’ve worked at some pretty good places!) And, no joke, all of my coworkers [...]
Category Archives: programming
Technology vs. Psychology
Posted by svec on May 11, 2009
3 comments
Do you write software for a living? Or design hardware? Or maybe some of each? While the particular projects any two software or hardware designers do may be worlds apart, we can characterize what we do in the same way: our work is 20% technology and 80% psychology. Most of the work we do is [...]
Define the problem, define done
Posted by svec on February 1, 2009
0 comments
I. M. Wright’s latest post “Green fields are full of maggots” talks about defining the problem and defining done. My favorite quote (which is, itself, a quote): “What’s so evil about general solutions? After all, your code could be both a floor wax and a dessert topping.” He makes some great points about building software [...]
Presentation Presence
Posted by svec on December 17, 2008
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A software vendor gave a sales presentation at my office today. The vendor sent two people to present – a sales guy and an engineer. The sales guy started the pitch with an overview of the software. Sounds great, says us, but we need a bunch of technical details to know if it’s worth pursuing. [...]
How to tell you’re a bad programmer
Posted by svec on December 7, 2008
0 comments
How to tell you’re a bad programmer: 1. You think you’re an awesome programmer. 2. But no one else has ever told you so. 3. You’ve never looked at old code you wrote and thought, “Ewwww! That is horrible code! What was I thinking???” 4. You’ve never looked at someone else’s code and thought, “Dang, [...]
Baby Steps
Posted by svec on July 22, 2008
0 comments
A few seemingly unrelated thoughts, and then a tie-’em-all-together thought: 1. Rands’ recent post on “Saving Seconds” really resonated with me. I forwarded it to my wife and said, “See, this is how I think!” so that she could better understand why I optimize the shortcuts on our PC, or the way I load the [...]
Using Stack Overflow
Posted by svec on June 26, 2008
0 comments
Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are starting a new website called Stack Overflow, it’s going to be a free programming Q&A website. I’m a fan of both of those guys (I even have an autographed copy of Joel’s book!), so I signed up to be a beta user to see how it develops. I was [...]
The Death Of the Desktop
Posted by svec on June 17, 2008
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And no, this “death of the desktop” post is not about how mobile devices or the browser is taking over the world – it’s about taking a step back and rethinking how we actually use computers (desktop, mobile or otherwise), and then trying to take a more usable step forward. Thanks to Chris Jones for [...]
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