81–90 of 216 posts
Emailing “Dave’s week in review” every Friday afternoon, to a distribution of everyone I have ever met professionally. The email summarizes what I did that week, both professionally and personally. Every week I hear from someone I know, as a result of the email. Many opportunities have resulted.
Interview process. From the start, we did away with whiteboard questions and instead opted for a take home test. The test wouldn't take more than an hour or two, depending on how much effort the candidate wanted to put into it. They got 2-3 weeks to complete it, with the help of the internet. Because the test was specially designed to weed out people that didn't know how computers/compilers worked, it was surprisingl…
I worked for a company that had gone from selling on premise software to cloud, and going from build to production release took a while. Realistically you could expect 1-2 days if everything went well. This was definitely not problem #1 at the company but I really wanted to push to see how much time we could shave off. I got some like-minded teammates to put time into a new release pipeline process, and we built some…
[EDIT] to be clear, quick painful dangerous releases are no better, and (pretty much necessarily) come with the same pain in onboarding, jumping between repos/projects, undocumented "oh sometimes you have to re-install that to get it going" works-on-my-machine bullshit, getting a good feedback loop going, et c.
Convincing the team that always-on dashboards with critical, actionable metrics would improve release rates and uptime. Making sure that upcoming new features and achievements are showcased to the whole company through weekly demos.
Encouraging others to ask questions. Forcing myself to ask in meetings as an example even though the questions look "stupid". It's uncomfortable but we've mitigated several implementation mistakes over the years. This sounds like truism but still rarely happen in practice.
I wrote a little tool that used perf profiles from our production fleet to generate a custom linker script that reordered our main server program’s binary to be significantly more cache friendly. The heuristic I came up with for reordering was one of the few (maybe the only) genuine “eureka” moments I’ve had in my career. And the performance win was extremely nice :-)
Mmmh... I rewrote big chunks of Firefox's Session Restore to ensure that people stopped losing their data in case of crashes. Pretty big impact on both Firefox and, hopefully, the life of a few hundred million users. I rewrote the Firefox Shutdown so that it actually worked. I also introduced structured async programming, async testing, async exception reporting in our codebase. And yes, I do enjoy bragging :)
For example, when a Garmin watch runs out of battery during workout (or if a software crashes), the workout always gets saved, and you can resume it when you turn the watch back on.