@OllieJones
Nothing here yet.
Nothing here yet.
No blogs yet.
Good info here. I'm an old-timer and have been through multiple downturns like this one. It's been a long time (since 2008) since the last big one, so this is the first for many people in our wonderful trade. Downturns will happen. So don't spend everything you make when you have a good job. Keep some after-tax -- not in 401(k) -- savings. Keep track of your company's remaining "runway". If you're not funded by customer revenue, you'll eventually run out of money and run off the end of that runway. Can you get investors to give you more in time to save jobs? If your executives spend investor money like drunken sailors, you'll know that. Even if you're a junior staff member. If you get the boot you'll probably get a package -- a salary continuation of a few months or weeks. Plan on stretching that money out. Evaluate your health insurance options. The ACA insurance exchange may have a cheaper plan than the COBRA coverage continuation offered by your company. It's sometimes worse not to get laid off: the remaining people have to do all their own work plus the work of their now-absent colleagues. Either way, think "opportunity". If you're laid off learn something new or work on open source stuff. If you're retained, make the most of the your increased responsibility. And, unless you're an executive, remember: you didn't cause this problem. Being laid off is not a reflection on your character or skills.
Good stuff. You're right about the equity part of your pay. Don't count on it to pay your bills. Between the stock / options / RSUs / whatever they grant you and liquidity lie several snares: Most companies that get to liquidity don't do IPOs, they get acquired. Are there some obvious companies out there that might want to acquire this startup if / when it becomes successful? How long is the "runway" for the company? How long until they need to either get enough customer revenue to sustain themselves or until they need another round of financing? Followon rounds of financing often reduce the value of options by dilution. Do the founders / executives really want a liquidity event? Do they have investors pushing them to sell? Or do they want to just keep running the business? The execs of profitable startups are often happy to just keep doing their thing, and won't feel pressure to sell. (Selling or IPOing is a huge pain in the xxx neck and can be far outside the skill set of operating executives.) Is their a barrier to entry for the product? Or can some megacorp simply copy what you do and reduce your value to zero?
This is great stuff! I hope Google decides to add some kind of carbon calculator to Lighthouse: we can't fix what we don't measure. For what it's worth, the Core Performance Team at wordpress.org offers a Performance Lab plugin to do stuff like convert images to the lighter-weight webp format, and many other things. https://wordpress.org/plugins/performance-lab/ (Yeah, I know, WordPress is old tech. But, it's not dead yet. It still powers something like 40% of the websites on the web by website count not traffic. So there's a LOT of carbon-saving leverage to be had by making it more efficient.)
Great stuff, thanks. One suggestion: your last couple of example tables need to be read across, but the lines are long. Quick, which order number was that order for 1619.19? I've had success using very subtle alternating background colors for even- and odd- numbered rows. #ffffff and #fdfdfd are different enough to help guide the eye without really altering the data-to-ink ratio. On screen. This sort of thing is much harder to pull off in print, especially on cheap monochrome laser printers. Anyhow, excellent work.
This is good stuff, thanks for bringing it to everybody's attention. Lots of back-end-heavy websites are out there, burning power in datacenter servers and databases as well as routers, fiber-optic drivers, and end-user computers. I personally have been working on making WordPress's database operations faster and more efficient. There's lots of CO2 leverage there because there are many of those sites. (Yeah, we could outlaw WordPress because it's a power hog, but, that won't work.) It's time for everybody to start thinking about web power footprint!
Use the stuff you already have to create as documentation. a. Write your specs as if for developers and users. Use the present tense, and state what your thing does. "This npm module zumbinates nonrecursive framisses. It takes immutable framisses as input and generates immutable output." See how much specification is there in just two sentences? See how useful it is to the user or the next dev. b. Put some comments in your unit tests.
Nice stuff. I have a suggestion: let's move away from the age-old myth that devs hate to write documentation. Like most myths it contains a kernel of truth, but that doesn't matter. Instead, let's look at the things we DO generate, and figure out how to make them also explain our work to the user or the next dev. Plans are documentation. Write 'em in the present tense. Write 'em as if for the next dev, not the product manager. "This module zumbinates non-recursive framisses, accepting immutable input and generating immutable output." etc. Unit tests are, basically, documentation with examples. They happen to be runnable. A couple of extra comments, and there's usable docs. I wonder what would happen if we start saying "Devs really love to help users and other devs. That's why we do this work. It's easy to explain what we do. It's called documentation."
It took some experience for me to get rid of my prejudices about programming language A always being far worse than language B, and tech stack A being worse than tech stack B. Sneering at--for example--Visual Basic or PERL or PCs or whatever is not just a waste of time, it's a barrier to really learning the trade of programming.