At the first company I worked for out of college, the CEO was a bit like a child. Whenever he came up with a new feature he wanted to add to the product, it had to be done asap otherwise we were going to "miss the boat." Every single time.

So rewind to a few years ago. It's a normal day at work and then suddenly my team lead and the CEO call my team into the conference room. The CEO starts telling us about this industry conference (we were in online dating) that was happening and this flashy new company dating company was going to be showing off this awesome search feature.

Naturally, our CEO concocted a Hail Mary plan of how our company was going to upstage this company and get all of the press to write about us instead. Basically, the "plan" was for us to build a brand new search feature of our own, in the week before the conference, and then he stated that the press would "have to write about us because ours will be better."

Everyone on my team knew it was ridiculous but we were pretty young and naive so we busted our asses to get this search feature out the door in the short week. The Friday before we stayed until like 2 AM. It was a little bit fun because the people on my team were cool, but the whole situation was absurd and no one, except the CEO, thought this had any chance of working.

Annnnddd in the end we didn't get an ounce of press, the search feature was pulled from our site, and the "awesome" company that we were so worried about getting all the press is out of business. But hey, we did get it done!

I always get a kick out of it when I get to read a hilarious email that was sent in to customer service about our product where the customer is so pissed that they curse everyone out and then they call out the programmers too. "You should fire all your programmers too, they suuckk!!!"

I named an alias variable feedItem in my database query but I keep accidentally typing feetItem. I have no one to blame but myself.

Recruiter hit me up with a great Java position in Oregon. I'm a web developer based in NYC...

Service status pages that poorly reflect actual service status are so annoying. Ex. GitHub is having a lot of latency issues with processing updates and like 5 people in my office noticed it while their status page still says everything is fine.

This isn't to explicitly call out GitHub since many service status pages behave like this, but it definitely shows a general weakness in these health checks. I've seen similar issues with tons of services, web hosts, etc. Monitoring is definitely hard but will hopefully keep getting better.

Confession: every now and then a Google search for a JS function or something directs me to W3schools. And I proceed to use it. And I'm not afraid to admit this!!

I know I'm pretty late to the party, but I've been playing with Redis a lot lately and it's pretty awesome. Sorted sets and the various Z functions seem very powerful. I'm hoping to get to use it in a prod environment soon.

If actions didn't have consequences then sprint planning would make for an excellent nap time. 💤

That feeling when you're finally done with a pretty big PR and ready to go live. You excitedly send it out to a few of your peers, and then... 20 comments! The real work has just begun 😭

A refactor a day keeps the doctor away!

Sublime Text is a great editor but the fact that active development on it has seemed to come to a hault sucks.