Your most valuable customer is frustrated because features are late. Meanwhile, your engineering team is drowning in overtime, and attrition is climbing. How do you keep customers happy without burning out your team?
During the pandemic, I bought <a href="https://studiozenkai.com/post/airbnb-vacation-home/">a vacation property in the Laurentians</a>, as an escape for the family but also for short-term rental on Airbnb.
Key facts</p>
<ul>
<li>Born in one of the world’s poorest countries, Madagascar. I get the “scarcity” mindset from this, but also memories of beautiful white sandy beaches</li>
<li>
In a Malagasy primary school, we stood in rows with wooden rifles. Straight, left, right, up, down. Shout. Repeat.</p>
<p>This North Korean-esque drill was physical education.
The progression of software engineers is like this:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Junior</em> You have theoritical knowledge of software but most of it is obscure
it was trending on CNBC or spamming your Facebook feed.</p>
<p>The exponential progress in the past few years means everyone can find cues to complex questions in a few seconds,
Ruby is charming. It’s elegant, expressive, and gets the job done—most of the time. But throw in high traffic, and suddenly your graceful app feels like a clunky mule dragging a cart uphill. Enter Crystal and Kemal: a duo that resembles Ruby’s syntax but sprints like C. It’s a setup that promises speed, simplicity, and a dash of thrill.
There is a sports store called Decathlon. My kids call it “the blue store”. Maybe you’ve heard of it. If you have a family or even just a pair of feet, you should go there. It is not for gold medalists. Or for Everest climbers. But it’s for the rest of us – the folks who want to move, to play and try something new without emptying the bank.</p>
<p>Decathlon makes “good enough” sports gear. The kind you grab when you are not trying to hit records, or just break a sweat.
articles</a>, it is clear my favorite programming language is Ruby, an elegant and concise language that brings results, fast.</p>
<p>Raw performance is not Ruby’s strengths.
One of my favorite movies is <em>The Secret Life of Walter Mitty</em> by Ben Stiller.</p>
<p>The movie is about life. It is also abut photography.</p>
<p>Why do you take pictures?
Ruby is poetry. In comparison, TypeScript feels like a technical manual. As a Ruby developer, you may look at TypeScript and think, <em>Why trade elegance for rules?</em>
When living in society, we constantly have to make choices: accept a job, buy a house, buy a car and so on.</p>
<p>There are many ways to make those choices, from personal preferences, constraints, opportunity vs cost and many others.
Programmers are attracted to big challenges, perhaps comparing themselves to Ed Hillary and Tenzig Norgay ascending Mount Everest. It brings prestige inside and outside the company, and opens them new doors.</p>
<p>
Not only intermittent fasting is a good way to manage your weight, it is only one of the rare ways to potentially increase longevity. Numerous studies have shown that fasting can help prevent cancer, heart disease, diabetes, neurodegeneration and improve immunity.
A weekly radio show airing every wednesday morning on CKUT 90.3fm montréal, Free City Radio
is on intersections between social activism, the arts & media landscapes
Sameer Zuberi is a board member of the Québec section of the Canadian Muslim Lawyers
Association & also holding a law degree from UQAM | Université du Québec à Montréal,
Sameer outlined intersectional perspectives on struggles against both overt & systemic
racism in Québec, as a original signatory to the Les #Moustiques open letter to protest
anti-Black racism in this society & specifically against the ongoing presence / racist
defence of Blackface by some ICI Radio-Canada media personalities
Foulab is a space for hardware makers, with the idea that any smart individual can imagine
and create new innovative electronics.
A few metro stations away from downtown Montreal, Foulab is located in an industrial
building, the kind you would expect to see hosting a rave party. Before coming to Foulab,
you’ll see a studio for artists:
Fiercely independent, Foulab is not sponsored by any government or corporation. It’s run by
its members, in a way similar to coops.
A convoy of truckers gathered in Canada’s federal capital last week. They protested
vaccine mandates but rode on a wave of discontentment against lockdown, inflation and more.
Many right-leaning Canadians value their “freedom” to do what they want, above
general public health. They state that they will build immunity naturally and let covid19
run its course. This is on top of a belief that distrust anything from government &
institutions.
I was introduced to the idea of playbook, which is basically a recipe to win a case. It can
be in a team sports situation, such as how to score in American football in a given
situation. It can be used by a salesperson, such as how to win a commercial contract.
I imagined what would be my Ruby Engineering playbook:
Focus on hard projects that move the needle in the long-term, or alternatively easy wins
(less than a day to implement+deploy) Do not reinvent the wheel.
Docker Desktop is one of the de facto tool present on macos developer machines, along with
other utilities such as git or homebrew. Contrary to apps such as VS Code, it not an app you
interact with everyday but more a background tool running constantly during application
development and deployment. It runs in fact the virtual machine that allows you to run
docker on Windows or Mac as if you were on Linux, albeit with a little bit more resources.
In Canada, as well as many countries, Covid-19 infections is exponentially decreasing.
We are on the verge of getting our old life back, from going to restaurants or to the
cinemas, and why not have a celebratory drink with friends.
Before moving on, I would like to share how I remote work, one of the main traits of the
Covid-19 pandemic. I hope this helps other remote workers, and encourage developers and
companies to adopt it on a permanent basis.
I decided this morning to cancel my Amazon Prime membership. I used it for free prime
delivery, and also for occasional prime videos, such as the excellent Elementary series. It
is also amazing to say “Alexa, play french songs” and discover pieces from
Amazon Music you knew nothing about.
I used to be a fan of the Amazon store. You could find rare items that were not sold
anywhere else, at unbeatable prices.
Today is Earth day and an excellent opportunity to reflect on human’s environmental
impact.
The pandemic hit countries like a truck and changed overnight our ways of working or
interacting with others. Many lost their jobs, others went into depression or worse got
infected with COVID-19.
The origin of the disease was little discussed. It is clear for me though that human’s
cancerous growth, especially deforestation, is linked to the pandemic.
How do you diagnose a slow web application? What about an unresponsive web application?
Those are questions I asked when interviewing recently developers. The questions are simple
to understand yet complex to answer. Many applicants study data structures or various
algorithms. Few have a holistic view of web applications, due to lack of experience or
because of niche specializations. They often work on a specific part of a web project, and
have little appreciation of work done in back-end, front-end, devops or other areas.