Peter Cresswell

Back at Waterloo Engineering, a classmate of mine was asked in a job interview: “What’s the one question you like to be asked?” “That question,” he said. The interviewer learned more in those two words than most interviews reveal in an hour: the candidate was quick and comfortable under pressure. Good questions do that. Bad ones produce long answers and no information, and most interview questions are bad. The Economist made this argument recently in its Bartleby column. It sent me back to what I learned interviewing engineers. Three lessons stuck.

JetBrains has recently introduced a new font called Mono and I love it. It’s intelligent in its considerations (ILlo0O all look distinctly different) and its ligatures are perfect for developers (see -> or ### for examples). Just for fun, I’ve switched my entire blog over to using it. Overkill? You bet. But why not show it off. If you’re writing code, I strongly encourage you to have a look. Read more from JetBrains.

Recently listened to a podcast with Peter Attia and Jason Fung on the topic of fasting. I’ve been a fan of Peter Attia’s for a bit now but I have not read or listened to his work lately. While Peter is still a big advocate of low carb diets, he’s also evolving to include time restricted eating patterns into his framework. He put together a great summary of his framework. I strongly encourage you to watch it.

At DoctorCare we’re a believer in the simplicity and value of continuous delivery. We try and avoid long lived branches. All pull requests go to master and master always ships. In fact, there’s no way not to ship master once a PR is merged (outside of stopping the build mind you). For the most part, we’re OK at this. Not great. But ok. We’re running a django application using Bitbucket Pipelines for deployments into AWS Beanstalk with a Postgresql RDS backend. That’s a pretty vanilla deployment if ever there was one and we’re happy to keep it simple.

A year ago, the software team at DoctorCare was a team of one. Just me. Since then, I have added two developers to the team, both junior. In previous positions, I’ve lead teams of up to 20 developers but in the past 5 years or so of working as a contractor and, in the past year, as a full time employee again, I haven’t had to play the team lead role. With this new growth of the team, I’m back to leading developers again.