My journey
I always wanted to land a job with 37signals. Wait? What does this have to do with GitHub? Bear with me. This may be a long post. They recently changed their name to Basecamp. They stopped developing other products, and focused on Basecamp. A project management and team communication tool. They extracted Rails from Basecamp … Continue reading Farewell GitHub, welcome HeavyMelon
If you complain for being bothered in Slack or other real time communication tools outside of normal working hours, it’s your fault. When you have a remote, distributed team, you have two approaches before you talk to a colleague. You either have to check their timezone every single time before you ping them to see … Continue reading It’s your fault people bother you
At GitHub, we rely on Issues heavily. Not only for bug reports, or for tracking feature implementation. We use them for almost everything. This includes, but is not limited to, discussions, announcements, ideas, tracking projects, capturing thoughts or pieces of documentation that will become pull requests, and many more. The problem with having an abundance … Continue reading How I avoid zombie GitHub Issues
When I started working at GitHub back in 2010, I moved away from a 12 year career in programming. I was going into technical support. I was the second support person at GitHub, and the first outside of the US. It wasn’t your typical support position. I was helping programmers and other GitHub users with … Continue reading The cycles of my professional life
A dead tree in the Spring.
A couple of weeks ago I found In the End. The last album by The Cranberries. It’s an album recorded after the death of Dolores. It’s also the last album of the band. They have decided not to find a new lead singer. I got emotional for many reasons. One of them, the fact that … Continue reading In the end
When the topic is complicated, threads are often long, stale, or both. Often, support is distributed across the globe. It’s not surprising to see several people participating in the discussion. If I am a support person in Europe, I may wake up and start working on a thread that starts in North America. The thread … Continue reading How to move long support threads forward
As I grow older, I catch myself feeling more indifferent about the religious side of Greek Easter. I am not sure why. In any case, here’s a nice picture of Mountain Olympus. The mountain of the Greek Gods. I took that during this year’s Greek Easter day feast. You know, the day (Sunday) you break … Continue reading Greek Easter 2019
The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that almost nobody — including Commodore’s marketing department — could fully articulate what it was all about. Today, it’s obvious the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was derided as a game machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics, sound, and video. Nine years later, vendors are still struggling to make systems that work like 1985 Amigas.
— Byte Magazine, August 1994
In a previous post I mentioned that I started maintaining a set of helper Ruby classes for working with barcodes. I have changed the structure of the project to make it a gem and I have published it on GemCutter.
