Music: Angels and Airwaves – Diary I’m always a little late on the 2012 lists, stick with me, this’ll be worth it. Executive Summary of 2012: I started 2012 by taking a bit of a risk careerwise, where before I had been the enterprise huge-company guy, I ventured into mid-sized startupish culture, pushing myself out …
Category: Life and Philosophy
Oct 30 2012
Great Interview Questions
Interviewing is not a one-sided conversation. If you land a job by only worrying about successfully impressing interviewers, you will almost certainly be surprised, and you may be unhappy once you start the job. It is critical that you understand that an interview is not about making the company happy and fitting their mold, it …
Oct 17 2012
Users aren’t stupid, your UI is.
tl;dr; version: Get your head out of your ass, stop adding complex features that 90% of the world won’t care for. Instead, learn to stop, breathe, and make your software products simple by focusing on usability consistently. Users aren’t stupid, your UI is. In a big bad world of federated software product development, Usability is …
Oct 11 2012
The story of Freddie Kreuger, the brave three-legged cat.
This is the story of Freddie Kreuger, the cat who taught me what patience and love are, and what it means to be brave. Freddie Kreuger and her 3 siblings were born in a neighbor’s backyard in May of 2010. The four kittens were born to a feral mother, who we mistakenly named “Mr. Bond” …
Oct 08 2012
Finally on GitHub, you should be too.
I’ve finally started migrating/publishing code on GitHub. Coder cowboy git code will be here: https://github.com/codercowboy For starters, I’m migrating old World’s Worst Software code there, so I can retire WWS. I highly recommend publishing your own open source code and projects on GitHub or SourceForge, or on a blog or website of your own. You …
Sep 26 2012
Correctness in the Real World
Music: Glitch Mob – Drink The Sea I failed calculus in college. I’m an applications guy, in that, if I can’t see the point, if I can’t see the payoff, I have a lot of trouble convincing myself effort is worthwhile. What happened was this: It was my first semester in college, and I took …
Aug 30 2012
The Trouble With Information
The troubling thing with professors not allowing students to cite wikipedia is the underlying truth that the debate hints at: everything you read anywhere has spin, misinformation, and exaggerated half-truth built into it. You can’t trust anything you read, unless you can prove the truth behind it. If your proof is Google PageRank style “Well …
Aug 01 2012
The worst salesman ever.
Fair warning, this post is filed in the ‘life & philosophy’ file, and it’s going to seem a bit tangental, but stick with me. I have a feeling many a programmer and otherwise intelligent readers will be able to relate. I hate funerals. It’s probably safe to say most people are not fans of funerals, …
Jul 30 2012
Personal Success
I saw a pretty great movie today that inspired me. The past year or so has been an interesting one in my personal and professional life. In that year it feels like I’ve really honed in on what I really want in career and what personal success truly is. Personal success is not a dollar …
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About
Jason Baker is a software engineer. He works on enterprise infrastructure for big companies. He also enjoys creating smaller scale software products and scripts in his spare time.