Author: cjemison

Pet Peeve: Haters of a Computer Science Education

Pet peeve Pet peeve: I think there should more diversity in tech. There should be more diversity of thought and people coding from various backgrounds. But, we shouldn’t crap on a computer science education. Just because you aren’t creating data structures, algorithms, databases, and operating systems everyday doesn’t mean these topics aren’t relevant. Everyone is […]

Starting a new role as a Principal Engineer

I quit my last role. Curious as to why? See my last post. It’s been a month since I started my new job. I really like it so far. I’m uncovering some warts, but nothing has made me run away thus far. I really like working for my boss–he’s a good friend and I’ve worked […]

Gentle Surrender

I think anyone walking into any new role walks in with expectations. Those expectations drive your interests in taking that job. It’s particularly interesting when the foundation is not what they claim to be. A type of buyers remorse is often felt when the reality of the situation of an organization is distorted or they […]

A computer science education is needed to be a Software Engineer.

I’m extremely biased when it comes to whether a computer science degree needed to become a software engineer. Laying all my cards on the table: I have bachelors and masters degrees in computer science (b-schools). I have hired engineers for my team and for the organizations that I’ve been a part of. I believe coding […]

I can’t stand to see another black body dead on the ground.

I can’t stand to see another black body lying dead on the ground. It bothers me emotionally; it keeps me awake at night. I don’t know these people who died, but they look like me. I can’t watch the news anymore. I don’t understand why this keeps happening.

Let’s add a little diversity to the mix.

Lack of diversity in tech is a huge problem in tech. There are so many underrepresented groups in most the largest tech firms in the country. As a black engineer I got use to sometimes being the only black candidate, the only black engineer on the team, and the only black employee in the company. […]

Moving to Kubernetes too soon

A couple of my friends and I have had several conversations around Kubernetes and team adoption. There’s nothing wrong with Kubernetes–it’s a great tool with a wonderful, rich development ecosystem. There’s a huge diverse development community that advocates for its members by helping anyone that needs advice on whatever issue you could be facing. Kubernetes […]

Deliver quality, not features or enhancements.

Delivering something that works consistently is far more important than delivering more capabilities that work sometimes. If development teams and/or customers are depending on your platform are constantly interrupted by an experience that leaves them with no desire use your platform, services, or components, then you could be losing them forever. It’s a chilling experience […]

Embrace devops culture, not just tooling.

I might be dating myself, but I remember when there wasn’t a public cloud to deploy to. No AWS, Azure, or GCP. Most of the organizations that I worked in Chicago had their own data centers. These companies rarely had a disaster data center(s) because it was too costly, deployments took hours/days, and run or […]