Ronin engineers
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You are not your programming language
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When your reputation precedes you
Your reputation is what people say about you behind your back. While you may be able to influence what people say about you, you cannot control what is said. Your reputation is subject to gossip, rumor, and office politics, and once damaged is difficult to repair. Establishing and maintaining a good reputation is essential to having a successful career, but few people are aware of their reputation, much less how their actions can positively or negatively affect it.
Managers who can’t build teams
A unified team is more effective at accomplishing objectives than a group of loosely organized individuals. When a company forms a team, they select a manager to be in charge, and make the team report to that manager. The issue with this approach is that only some types of managers are capable of building a group of individuals into a team.
How this website’s design came about
When I first started working exclusively as a software engineer, people who knew me as a designer were convinced I had gone mad: “Who wouldn’t want to do design?” Short answer: Me. I did design for other people for the first 7 years of my career, and let me tell you – it sucked. It sucked because all of my effort and inspiration would go into a design, only to have it reduced to, “Can you make it blue instead of brown – my wife likes blue.” That was an actual, real statement for my last design client. It wasn’t that this was the first time I had received feedback on my designs (and this was by no stretch of imagination the worst feedback I have every gotten), but it was the last straw. It would be years before I opened Photoshop and Illustrator again.
Why I finally decided to start a blog
Back in 1998, I made my first real, publicly accessible website. It was NeilsMachine.com (long since taken down), and it was a “blog” before blogs were blogs. I talked about nothing at all, because I really had nothing to say. Shortly after my NeilsMachine days, I got caught up in my professional career and let all my personal sites languish and die. When I did my own consultancy, I never managed to get a website up, which always bothered me. The challenge, I found, is that when would I have time to do my own website when I was building sites for others? I made several good stabs at it – including one design that to this day is still very cool – but they never saw the light of day.