I’ve been trying to spend a little more time reflecting on where I am, where I want to go, and where I’ve been. One of the largest single-product projects I’ve ever undertaken was my philosophy thesis, Spoken Worlds. Five months of writing to produce about 9000 words on the subject of linguistic relativism.
Linguistic relativism is an idea in linguistic philosophy whose thrust is that people’s thoughts are very much structured and confined by the language that they grow up in.
What’s important to you about where you work? Is it the people, the technologies, the processes? Is it success or fortune?
I’ve been interviewing technologists for the last several years and this is a conversation I’ve had time and again. As you’d expect, answers vary a lot, though there are certainly themes centered around where people are in their careers:
High performers earlier in their careers want learning and new technologies.
High performers in the middle of their careers want stability and good people around them.
Those same folks later in their careers tend to assume the former, but instead seek out hard problems.
I can now measure my career as being two decades old. I was 16 in 1998, and in lieu of pursuing my drivers licenses, I was instead trying to start a web development company. A number of now lifelong friends and I called ourselves X over Zero web technologies. A testament to our youthful idealism, we were charmed with the idea of the result of the equation X/0 being positive infinity. We had the now-defunct xoverzero.com and thought ourselves young entrepreneurs.
BombBomb’s video messaging app helps businesses drive sales and convert leads by building trust and engaging customers face to face — even when they can’t be physically present with a client. It’s a smooth, simple user experience that makes capturing, encoding and sending videos in real time seem easy.
The technology that makes all that possible, though, is far from simple.
Behind the scenes, BombBomb’s engineering team must go beyond full-stack development to create complex systems that work in the cloud, in bad connectivity and within single-digit seconds. We asked VP of Technology Patrick McDavid to dive into the details of BombBomb’s robust tech stack and explain both the opportunities and challenges he and his team face.
I wrote here a few months ago about Easy Cloudfront cache-busting with Travis-CI. I’d not really liked the solution I offered in that post and am back to share the far better solution I found this week, which is just about as easy!
2017 was a year of upheaval and growth by necessity.
At Home
It’s a girl!
Our daughter, Wren, came in May. The second child is multiplicative rather than additive, for sure. Our son was two, so we’d seen a bit of parenthood, but the new effect started on day one with our son having brought a little impetigo infection to the recovery room. Ok, so our one-hour-old has to contend with the germ warfare going on at daycare from the start? That’s new.
