I'm a software engineer that writes occasionally about building software, software culture, and tech adjacent hobbies. If you want to get in touch, send me an email at [my_first_name]@tejusparikh.com.
Open office plans get a lot of bad press. They are characterized as loud, overly-exposed, and distracting. Yet, for a small technology team, they are the best office layout.
Headphones, big screens, furious typing and infrequent verbal communication characterize the working environment in small engineering teams. Regardless of official HR structure, individuals in engineering teams also operate as peers which makes the shared environment more socially comfortable. This also helps with privacy. Every listener can be viewed and spoken conversation does not result in mole heads appearing above cubicle walls.
Two column layouts on the web break down when one column is much longer than the other. Scroll far enough and some significant portion of the screen is empty.
One solution is to have each column independently scroll but multiple scroll bars can be very confusing for a user. A better solution is the one employed on Yahoo News where the shorter right panel is floating relative to the left but still scrolls with the primary browser scroll.
“Fast, cheap, and good; pick any two” is a standard axiom of project management. Software development in innovative markets is one area where this no long holds true. Teams in this environment need to deliver on all three and these are some tips I’ve found make it possible.
Yesterday, May 15, 2014 was the final day in a four and a half year ride that started at Vertical Acuity and ended at Outbrain. The moment is bittersweet and I’m going to miss working on the fantastic technology we built. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, Outbrain is no longer the right place and it’s time for a change.
I decided to use the somewhat enforced period of free time to learn something that’s been on the back burner for a while, iOS development. Along with learning new things I’ve also been making it back to the gym more frequently and decided to marry the two and build an application to track my workouts.
I could have easily made it a web application, but decided to force myself to build a native iOS app, something that I haven’t done since late 2008. I’m about 30% done, but just needed to vent a little about the frustrations I’ve encountered.
Startups need the best talent to succeed, but they need to acquire that talent without budget busting salary compensation. Startups can bridge the gap with a better culture, a more meaningful work experience, and the opportunity to grow faster than in a corporate environment. Soft and fuzzies go a long way towards wellbeing, but come up short when it’s time to pay the bills. Equity compensation is often the answer. The ownership stake in the company will more than compensate for the decrease in salary if the company does well. Equity is also the murkiest piece of the compensation puzzle since it depends entirely on predicting the future. So how do you figure out exactly what that 2% stake is worth?
Sit or stand, that is the question when it comes to office furniture. Standing desks will help you live longer, lose weight, and focus more, at least according to articles like this one on Wired. I loved my Geek Desk, but I found that the experience was not as life changing as promised. This is the run down of my experience with it.
Last week I got back from a semi-long trip out to the San Francisco bay area. The reasons for the trip were entirely personal, but I still took the opportunity to meet up with a few old friends from Atlanta technology world and soak in the local culture. There were a few things that really struck me on this trip.
Startups often have more needs beyond the skills available within the team. Just within engineering division, there are needs in engineering, infrastructure, design, and third party integrations. Some of these can be easily learned, but others, like infrastructure and design, often require special talent or extensive experience. Remote contractors are a great way to add these skills to your team. WideAngle (formerly Rivalry) would still be in development instead of out in production without these valuable people.
Atlanta lacks neither talent nor ideas. The cost of living is low, which has a similar effect on opportunity cost. So where are all the technical co-founders? One thesis, articulated by my friend Rob Kischuk postulates there are not enough interesting problems suitable for the engineering talent (Edit: not exactly correct). I think this idea is close, but off the mark.
A code blogger once tweeted that learning a new framework is really just learning a new way of handling pagination. There is a very good pagination module for Angular JS and a very good pagination gem for Rails,but the two do not speak the same language. Instead of rolling my own solution that would not work as nicely, I decided to write a little bit of glue code to make the solutions compatible.
It was typical Atlanta mid-November morning in 2004 when I drove down 400 to my first real job at Vocalocity. I pulled into the parking filled with excitement and nerves over entering the unknown. I took the elevator up, walked through the doors, and jumped head-first into Atlanta’s startup scene. It been almost exactly a decade and so much has changed. What follows are my observations from the last 10 years.
Use the Levenshtein distance on an encoded sentence
The application that I build for work functions much better when there’s a historical track record of answers to a specific question. Since the users enter the questions in themselves, I needed a way to alert them that significantly changing an existing question was not desired behavior. This was a rare opportunity to do some “real programming” and flex the normally dormant theory muscles. I took a morning and came up with an algorithm that fit my needs.
It’s hard to believe that I joined Rivalry just six months ago. I recently wrote about the difficulties business oriented founders can have in hiring technical talent. On the surface, Rivalry has many of the characteristics of an undesirable spot for a technically oriented talent. So what convinced me that joining Rivalry was the right way for the future?
This site is created and maintained by Tejus Parikh.
Any opinions, commentary, and related on this site are entirely my own and do not reflect the views and
values of any current, previous, or future employer, unless explicitly stated.
