Should I Have a Facebook Account?

Poll Results As Of 6-3-2015

In order to find out what people think of my question, I put up a poll on Google+. I ditched Facebook some time ago, and thus far I have to say that I find myself with more time for blogging and other productive interests since I don't have one. I also find myself not compulsively checking my phone every 2 minutes to see if <so and so> ate <that really cool designer food stuff>.

All kidding aside, my professional/personal network is pretty solid, and I'm not entirely certain I'd make it any stronger by adding Facebook back into the equation. Since I haven't been on it in a few years, I honestly have no idea what kinds of feed grooming tools and other signal/noise toggling features they've built in to the service to make it more useful for the customers.  I can say that without much doubt, Facebook provides their development staff with all kinds of amazing things: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-vs-google-best-employer-2013-11, and I support any company that treats developers like rock stars. However, if I get back onto Facebook I want to maximize it's potential for helping me propel my career, network, and life goals.  Here's the things it has to offer to be worth it for me:

• More readers on this blog
• Stuff that I want to read, not just random nonsense that I don't care about
• Connectivity to people I care about, not to people who I barely know

I really don't know if I can curate a Facebook account well enough to accomplish those things up there. I suppose it's probably possible, but I really want to protect myself from being consumed in it again, I've really enjoyed my Facebook hiatus thus far and I don't want to find myself coming back to this blog in 3 months saying "Well, I quit Facebook, again." Garth Brooks and Michael Jordan can retire more than once, but I'm not sure if it'd do me any good ;).

So, what do you think - honestly? Can Facebook really be a valuable tool, or is it more of a time waster that makes Mark Zuckerberg a ton of money?

Which Programming Language Should I Learn?

It's college graduation season, so it got me to thinking a little bit about the important infancy of our careers. For many of us, that infancy starts in a university classroom where we don't get to pick which language we're learning, the professor(s) pick for us. When I was in school my first class (and first class I wrote) was in C++.  Every subsequent class after that point was in Java or C (except my programming languages class, which was in... a bunch).  My senior project was C# 1.5. So, even in the short amount of time (relatively speaking) I was in school - I got exposed to 4 languages while learning the craft.

Let me make something very clear - I do NOT think the right way to think about computer science or software engineering is to learn the syntax of a specific language. In some ways, programming and carpentry go nicely together in this regard. A carpenter can use a circular saw, a band saw, a handsaw, a jigsaw, and many other kinds of saws that I know nothing about because I'm not a carpenter. But if you were to ask a carpenter "What's the best saw to use to build these kitchen cabinets" he might look at you sideways, because a saw is a tool and he'll probably use several different ones building your kitchen cabinets. Languages are tools. Saws are tools. Let's make this point VERY clear.

Now that I got that out of the way - once you have a fundamental understanding of what a call stack is, how arrays work, what data structures are, etc. etc., THEN we can talk about programming languages.  On my current project/product here's our choice of tools/languages:

• PHP
• AngularJS
• Ruby (Chef Scripts)
• MySQL (Not really a programming language, but each flavor of SQL is a bit different too)

Is this the right set of tools for everyone? Absolutely not. But for my company in our current situation it's the set of tools that makes the most sense for the solution we're building.  In order to best know the direction in which most companies are moving for writing their software, there's several places to look to know what the most popular technologies in use are.

1. ThoughtWorks technology radar - this thing does a great job of showing whats gaining momentum, what's losing momentum, and also explaining why you should care. Broken down into 4 categories (Techniques, Tools, Languages/Frameworks, Platforms) it really helps to zero in on industry patterns.
2. TIOBE Programming Community Index - if you want to know if your favorite programming skill is in demand right now, this is a pretty nice place to look
3. Indeed.com Job Trends Graph - What I really like about this is that you can plot it in relative mode or absolute mode. Relative mode is great for showing how strongly something new may be growing, even if it's current market share may be minimal. Here's a couple of neat relative graphs for your viewing pleasure. Just to get an idea of why relative and absolute are different, switch graph modes at the top right of the graph - you'll see what I mean.
1. AngularJS vs. jQuery
2. Java vs. Python 
3. Java vs. PHP

I'd love to hear if you have any specific places you like to go to keep track of emerging trends in the world of engineering. It's nice to know what's coming our way, so that we can remain better prepared for whatever's coming next.

What Am I Reading?

A funny thing about our jobs, we do two things for a living. We write and we read. Yes, we get paid to read. In fact, the more we write, the more we have to read about what we are writing. As the author of this blog I produce content once a week. As a consumer of content I read multiple articles, multiple times a day. I also read books on occasion. While I could list the things I read, look for individual in depth reviews of the most important stuff I'll make individual posts. Instead I want to write a little bit about how I decide what I find important enough to read. This generally falls into two categories.

1. Learning how to best implement code/configuration x on platform y
2. Theory and best practices

So, if you want to know how I learn to implement something, it's pretty easy to explain. If I can't ask an expert in my company, I ask the internet experts at StackOverflow.com. Usually my questions are already sufficiently answered on there. When they are I hit the up vote button. Every great once in a while I have a question about something that nobody has answered before. Even then, StackOverflow to the rescue. Really, most of my technical implementation research comes from any of the family of StackExchange sites. It's a wonderful platform for people like us to share our expertise and pitfalls with one another.

The more subtle and somewhat complex reading list I have revolves less around actual technical implementation and more around architectural/developmental theory. Figuring out how I want to best expand my horizons in these areas - I'm still working that out. Here's a couple of things I do to find articles that I want to save for later:

• I follow other content producing developers and companies around on Twitter, they tend to have useful things to say somewhat frequently.
• I follow content producing developers and companies around in Google+
• Because of the links I read, my phone makes recommendations about a few things that might be of interest to me
• Oddly, I don't currently have an RSS feed reader that I rely on. I've played with having one in the past, but I ended up just ignoring everything it captured, so I stopped using it
• For things I read that I find myself regularly referring to I use Evernote capture and switch to article mode
• I have a close knit group of colleagues that recommend content to me

So, long story short, for the most part I look for the right kinds of people/companies through my social media channels. I ditched Facebook some time ago, mostly because my signal/noise ratio was heavily out of balance. I may venture back into RSS reading again some day, but honestly my social media interaction provides me with enough rich content that I'm not sure I'd find additional time to try to track more things via RSS. What do you think? How do you decide what's worth your time to read? I'd love to know how my blog got onto your reading list, so leave a comment to let me know!

Who Do You Look Up To?

As software engineers, we have the blessing of a vast peer network we can tap into. While many other industries also have great peer networks they can interact with, we as engineers get to interact in places like Stack Overflow, and we get to find other people that love doing work in code as much as we do. Though this kind of network provides us with a collective knowledge base, one of the things that it doesn't provide really needs to come from something more interactive and direct. I recently started reading Soft Skills by John Sonmez, and on a whimsy reached out to him on Twitter. As it turns out, John likes interacting with fellow geeks quite a bit, so I like interacting with him personally.

Yet, even still - while John's advice provides me great value, he doesn't fill a critical role that I think every engineer (or, really, anyone who works for a living) needs. While it's great to have interactive peers and people smarter than you influencing your forward career path, I think having a someone to call a mentor makes a huge difference as you through your professional growth. In my case, I consider my professional mentor this man: Jack Bader.  As far as technology professionals go, if you measure success as loving your job and getting paid really well to do it, Jack has quite a bit of it. So, in that regard I feel like Jack can teach me a great many things about the path I'm on for my career.  And, as far as I define mentors, a mentor is someone that you can email, or send and IM, or a text message, and likely get a favorable response within the next several hours. A smart colleague is someone you can tweet or email and hear back from in a few days. A mentor is someone that basically sits on retainer and does so willingly and excitedly because they like interacting with you, and feel like your success is their success.

Not only do I feel like it's important to have a professional mentor, but I also feel like the another crucial way to advance your career is to also act as a professional mentor. Though relatively early in my career (I've only been a professional for 8 years) - I've also been blessed with the opportunity to mentor a current (almost) graduate from my alma mater, Drury University. He was gracious enough to write about it and give me some major props. (OK, so I'm bragging a little, but seriously if someone wrote about you the way that Zach wrote about me, you might brag a little too.) Here's what Zach Glossip had to say about mentorship - and I think he said it more eloquently than I ever could.

I think we have a responsibility as professionals to the future generations of professionals that come after us. While we may not necessarily worry about what happens to our past employers or our last employer once we retire, as responsible global citizens we can teach other professionals how to be responsible global citizens too.  For engineers, I think this means raising other engineers to want to interact with their peers, and to want to write their code so that anyone can understand it later (hopefully by following some of the design patterns that our industry relies so heavily on).

Mentoring the future generation of engineers contains a significant number of topics, some of which I'm really not going to be the best equipped to act as the teacher on. What do you think we need to teach the engineers of the future? Software and technology are perched to take a strong social, political, and economical foothold, growing rapidly as we move into the future. How can we engage future generations to use it in the best ways we can?

“Boba Fett? Boba Fett? Where?” (Star Wars Day)

Image Credit: http://www.starwars.com/may-the-4th

Geek culture has adopted today as Star Wars Day.  For those of us who fit into geek culture, we tend to say silly things like "May the 4th Be With You" most of the day. And in general the responses we get back are good natured too.

As a fair warning, I don't really intend on answering the question in my title today. Actually, it's not really a question to answer, it was more of a rhetorical panic from Han Solo, but it seemed like it was appropriate to use as a title/question today.

Thinking about Star Wars today also got me to thinking about something else. George Lucas created an empire when he created Star Wars a few decades ago. That empire started as a vision and as an idea. The first time he showed the film to critics, they hated it. At least some of this was due to the fact that it didn't have a John Williams score or any real foley effects in it.  From anecdotes I've heard from other mega fans, apparently the first time it was screened Storm-troopers fired cap guns (based on the sounds they made and the evident lack of any "blaster bolt"). But, Mr. Lucas had a vision - and he didn't give up on it just because he ran into some opposition.

Setbacks, (or as we engineers like to call them, "bugs") always need to be treated as an opportunity to do a few things.

1. Fix the problem. This one should be obvious - if someone reports a bug, take the time to fix it.
2. Fix the process that didn't catch the problem. This one isn't quite as obvious. 
• The first step in this should probably be writing an automated test of some kind that reproduces the production problem. Then you can always be assured that new code won't cause a regression and recreate the problem that someone found in production.
• The second step in this is something I'm still debating with myself, as I don't think there's a clear right or wrong answer as to how to better prevent production bugs. More time in QA? Better code review time? Better beta testing? I don't think that I even need a right answer. The really important thing that any production bug should cause is the desire to review the development process, and ensure it's as good as it can be within its constraints.

Bugs aren't the only setbacks we face as engineers, but they sure can be some of the most annoying ones. Especially when we get paged at 3AM and told our system has crashed because someone forgot to wrap a database call in a try/catch, so connection pools exhausted rapidly... <cough>. But, as long as we continue to see these kinds of challenges as an opportunity for doing it better tomorrow, then I think the Force will be with all of us. Even on days other than May the 4th. And just maybe we'll all be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Boba Fett.