I’ve been working as a remote software developer for over five years now. I gather that some outfits do this better than others. In case they’re useful/inspirational for anyone else, I want to highlight the key things that have made this workable for so long. The key idea: Treat your remote workers as first-class, full-fledged members of the team. Have a chat server which everyone is connected to whenever they are working.

First in an occasional series where I show how old I am by reminiscing about the ’90s World Wide Web. Do you remember the Altavista search engine? I don’t mean the thing that Yahoo bought and buried. I mean the original 1990s version. Altavista was an exciting game-changer when it arrived at the end of 1995. Web search had a lot of room for improvement. Altavista’s two standout attributes that crushed the competition (e.

I’ve been reflecting recently on my twisty path from being a kid with a computer to being a grown-up who is (apparently) a bona fide software engineer. My first computer was a TRS-80 Model III. It had a 1MHz 8-bit Z-80 CPU, 64KB of RAM, and two 5.25" floppy disk drives (after upgrades). I used it to play games, write papers, and learn how to write software – mostly in BASIC, though I eventually learned Z-80 assembly language.

(This is another thing I found myself writing on Quora and wanted to keep. The question was “Does Python have any scalability limitations?”) “Scalability” is a term people like to throw around, but the less specific you are as to what you mean by it, the less substantial the answers will be. It is not a simple linear measure on which languages can be given some numerical score. Languages and their implementations do have certain inherent performance characteristics, but in order to understand their relevance to your needs you have to get specific about your needs.

(Somebody on Quora asked about “traits that the best programmers seem to have”. Here’s what I said.) Breadth of understanding. They are not dogmatic. They have used (at least in passing) more than one language, framework, operating system – and understand the strong points of each. Communication skills. They can explain their decisions. They can write code reviews. They can discuss their code. Understanding that engineering is about tradeoffs. There is never an absolute “best” answer; there are always many choices each with their own sets of pros and cons.

Last summer I switched from OS X to Ubuntu for my day-to-day work. It’s gone well. Here’s a condensed rundown of some of the things I’ve noticed. Things I miss when using OS X: ctrl key on both sides of the keyboard one-key app switching System-wide package management ctrl-alt-T default to bring up a new terminal Things I miss when using Linux: Selecting menu items by typing their first letters Emacs-compatible key bindings in text fields LaunchBar Consistent mic support across applications Full-fledged Exchange integration (still haven’t bothered to get davmail running) Cross-platform bright spots:

Once in a while I look at a sampling of recent dpaste activity. Partly I do it so I’m not totally out of touch with what my site contains. Partly I do it because it’s just interesting. And I do it to confirm that the site is actually used by people who want to share code snippets, not just spambots who fire their cannons into every porthole. I just sampled 10 random items from the last week.