You are debugging in Visual Studio, you stop the debugger and hit F5 again. Now Visual Studio is re-building several of your projects and it takes a long time before the debugger launches again. What gives? Unnecessary builds in Visual Studio are a problem I’ve seen over and over in my projects, and it’s particularly annoying for large solutions. In …
Prioritization: Rank, don’t bucket
It’s the start of the sprint or milestone and everyone has come up with plenty of things to work on. The task list is long and as usual, resources are limited. So what we do? Let’s have a meeting to prioritize all the work items! I’ve attended my fair share of these meetings and they typically take one of two …
Hitting PAUSE
“What if we took a break from work to travel the world with our kids?” The idea This is an idea that started to float in our heads a couple of years ago. It got seeded back in 2015 when one of my wife’s friends from work took 6 months off to travel with his family. At that time it …
Working at Microsoft vs Facebook
“How does working at Microsoft compare to Facebook?” This is a question I’ve gotten a lot in the last year. Back in 2017 I joined Facebook after spending most of my career at Microsoft. In this post I’ll try to answer this as objectively as I can :). But first a disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own. They …
Software Engineer Skills: Four Growth Areas
Being an effective software engineer requires a mix of different skills. In this article, I provide a framework for how to think about your skillset and guidelines for how to improve in each area. At a high level, a software engineer needs to leverage four core types of skills: I strongly believe that the impact of these core skills is …