How to Treat Ex-Employees
It’s Julie’s last day at work. She’s already turned in her laptop to IT, sent her goodbye email to the team, and is wrapping up her last knowledge transfer...
Write Your Way Out
Photo courtesy of Ben McCarthy In September 2016, I was honored to be invited to speak at Joe and Charles’s incredible Release Notes conference in...
Impossible Ideas
If I could show just one talk to every software engineer, it wouldn’t be a treatise on the elegance of algorithms, a lecture about accessibility in apps, or...
Professional Ghostbusting
It’s scary how much email I get at work. Despite Slack’s best efforts, much of the business world still “runs on email.” In 2019, the inboxes in my life are...
Culture Rot
This weekend, I spoke to the audience of the Difficult to Name reading series at Study Hall in Brooklyn. My talk was about the internet, my fears about...
Code is Prose
I first saw the phrase “Code is poetry” pop up on websites and in conversations about the craft of software development in the early 2000s. Popularized by...
Barely Managing
A talk I gave last year at the CocoaLove conference in Philadelphia about why you might want to step away from the keyboard and into leadership, and what...
Activist Engineering
You’ve been there. You’re sitting in a meeting and your boss, a product manager, or an executive is talking about Q2 goals. They’re laying out a roadmap of...
Reviewing Code: A Checklist
You’ve been there. A 10,000 line pull request lands in your email and you don’t even know where to begin. No description provided. Should you start by...
The Idea Guy
A few years ago I was tasked with helping to recruit interns for The New York Times iOS team1. I traveled around to top-tier engineering programs at...
The Website Isn’t Your Problem
Inside The New York Times Building next week, it’s going to get harder to do your job. Clifford Levy, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, and former...
Once More With Feeling
For years now this website has merely pointed people to my profiles on other websites and social media services. It wasn’t always that way. In the past, it...
Lowering the Gates
Photo courtesy of Jason Kuffer A year ago, I sat in a glass-walled conference room at The New York Times in a routine meeting. I listened as a business-...
Software Criticism
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of...
The Best of Times
A month ago, on September 4th, I finished my last day as a senior iOS engineer at The New York Times. Two years there taught me a lot about building software...
RTFM: Things You Missed in the HIG
I gave a talk about iOS interface design at SecondConf today, and I think it went pretty well.
You’re Up
Whenever I go to tech conferences or meetups, I almost always end up traveling with either Brian or Andrew from Lickability. Let’s face it, I’m a nerd, and...
Don’t Go to College
Photo courtesy of Willam Hartz This is a speech I gave at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Honors College Orientation. The audience was primarily...
App Definition
Photo courtesy of Cristiano Betta The app definition statement is a concept that I’ve been obsessed with since I first read about it in the original iOS...