Every few years somebody in finance gets curious, and that curiosity lands on engineering’s desk. Ours landed in March, as a spreadsheet with 84 rows and one shared company card number at the top of every one. The request was…
In January 2019 I sat in a planning meeting where a staff engineer proposed rewriting our front end. Again. The pitch was thirty slides about rendering performance and developer velocity, and it was a good pitch, because he had written…
In 2021 I joined a project to move an aging application onto a new front end. The plan had a nice clean shape: rebuild the UI in the new stack, keep the API, delete the old code, go home. The…
It was 4:45 on a Friday when a teammate Slacked the whole engineering group a link. A charting library, gorgeous demo page, animated transitions, forty stars on GitHub added that afternoon. He wanted it in the next sprint. I said…
A junior engineer on my team once told me, with some pride, that our codebase did not use MVC. “We just use hooks and components,” he said. Twenty minutes later we were reviewing his pull request: one component file, six…
At my second job, sometime around 2011, a senior developer looked at the code I was proud of and told me to spend my train commute reading Underscore.js. Not the docs, the source. I thought he was joking. He was…
Two winters ago my flight out of Denver sat on the tarmac for three hours with the seatbelt sign on. My laptop battery was at sixty percent, the airline wifi wanted twenty dollars, and I had one video cached locally:…
Last winter a former colleague sent me a bug tracker link and asked if I knew anyone who could look at a document search tool his company had inherited. The export button took forty seconds on big accounts. The README…