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Mel Reams

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Hiring funnels are a thing

Posted on 2016-10-24 in career, hiring, interviewing, looking for jobs, unsolicited advice

Recently I went to a Victoria BC Startups meetup about diversity and inclusion in recruitment called Lever talks Diversity and Inclusion in Recruitment. What I learned the most about was how hiring funnels work. I first learned about the concept of funnels from sales funnels, where you start at the top with lots of people who are simply aware your product/service exists, and work your way down through getting them interested in.. Read More

Talk of the day

Posted on 2016-10-20 in development, talk of the day, tip of the day

I really enjoyed this recording of the Pycon 2015 keynote and I think you will too. My favourite part was the bit about we are all statistically unlikely to be terrible – it’s called a normal distribution for a reason, most of us are, drumroll please…. normal! Sure, you’re not super likely to be extraordinary (if everyone was then it really wouldn’t be extraordinary), but you’re not super likely to.. Read More

Why not start with an IDE?

Posted on 2016-10-17 in development, learning

In college our first Java classes used a text editor (TextPad), not a full featured IDE like Eclipse, and compiled and ran our programs from the command line. When we finally started using Eclipse, I was kind of pissed off that we’d spent so much time slowly and painfully debugging our code when Eclipse could’ve just told us exactly where the problem was. Knowing what I know now, I totally understand.. Read More

Dev tool of the day

Posted on 2016-10-13 in dev tool of the day, tip of the day

Hey java devs, somebody built a REPL! It even runs in the browser, nothing to install or configure (or curse at). I love this thing for when I can’t remember which function accepts a null parameter and which one freaks out and throws a null pointer exception, it’s so helpful. There is a REPL in Java 9, but we haven’t even switched to 8 yet at work (always let someone.. Read More

Happy thanksgiving!

Posted on 2016-10-10 in Uncategorized

Happy thanksgiving readers! In the spirit of thanksgiving (and not making you read too much when you’re just going to end up in a turkey coma), here are some things I’m grateful for: Being lucky enough to enjoy doing a job I can make a good living at. The tech industry certainly has its flaws, but it beats the hell out of the jobs I had between high school and.. Read More

CSS tip of the day

Posted on 2016-10-07 in Uncategorized

If for any reason you ever need to center a circle inside of a another circle using CSS, here’s how. That delightful person even created a jsFiddle so you can test it out yourself. And in the spirit of almost-Canadian-thanksgiving, I give thanks for stack overflow :)

What if I don’t know?

Posted on 2016-10-03 in Uncategorized

I was listening to the Developer Tea podcast the other day and caught a re-air of an episode about how to handle questions that you don’t have good answers to. The very short version of their answer (which I totally agree with) is don’t say “I don’t know” and stop there, follow it up with “but I can find out.” And then, you know, actually find out and follow up.. Read More

Not all problems need to be solved with code

Posted on 2016-09-26 in best practices, career, development

If you’re a programmer and someone asks you to solve a problem, that means the problem needs to be solved by writing code, doesn’t it? That’s what programmers do, right? Not necessarily! Knowing how to write good code is a huge part of being a good developer, but so is knowing when not to write more code. Take this question from reddit for example. If the problem is that you need an.. Read More

The dining philosphers

Posted on 2016-09-19 in Uncategorized

I read this article by Uncle Bob called The Lurn (it’s a companion piece to an earlier article of his called The Churn), where he mentioned a lot of topics that he thinks are more important for developers to learn about than just scrambling to keep up with the latest languages and frameworks (not that you shouldn’t learn a few of those, but you’re going to hit diminishing returns pretty.. Read More

Talk of the day: Be Awesome By Being Boring

Posted on 2016-09-15 in best practices, development, learning, opinion, talk of the day

Because I’m a Katrina Owen fan, I’ve watched a bunch of her talks. Recently I was watching her talk on Therapeutic Refactoring (it’s great and you should watch that one too), saw that it was from Cascadia Ruby Conf, and decided to see what other talks from that conference were recorded anywhere. One that grabbed my eye right away was called Be Awesome By Being Boring by John Hyland. The gist of his.. Read More