This is the second interview in an ongoing (but sporadic) series of interviews with famous programmers and authors of books that should be required reading for any serious developer.  Lynne Jolitz is an accomplished author, 386BSD hacker, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and all-around geek.  She has long been a figure in the tech community.  Regular readers [...]

With all of the gloom and doom forecasts about the global recession and layoffs everywhere, I’m interested to hear how this mess is affecting programmers. Despite the generally abysmal outlook, many statistics specific to the tech sector fall into the unchanged or optimistic buckets.  Meanwhile, TechCrunch and others are proclaiming that the tech industry [...]

This is the first interview in an ongoing series of mini-interviews with famous developers and programming authors. Rebecca Heineman has kindly agreed to be the first interviewee. She has been a games programmer for almost 30 years - she has written and designed many titles over the course of her career including a Bards [...]

Portfolios have been used for years by architects, artists, and designers, but why not for computer programmers? A programming portfolio is a great way to showcase your best work, and highlight your involvement in challenging projects. It provides a great talking point during an interview, and gives more insight into your work [...]

In the first post in this series, I talked a bit about different indicators of job satisfaction and how you can rank your own job for each of those criteria. In this post I’ll list simple steps anyone can take to improve personal job satisfaction in each of these areas: quality of projects, work-life [...]

Are you satisfied with your job? Are you satisfied with where your career path is taking you? These are important questions, and I try to take time to think about this every 6 months or so. Its usually trivial to make a general statement rating job satisfaction: “Yeah I like my job.” [...]