So... smart and gets things done. Honestly that's all I look for on a resume. You also have to talk about it in an interview.<p>I couldn't care less if you can invert a binary tree. One of the greatest developers I've ever worked with, I hired straight out of college. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree but his senior year he took a course in Java and liked it and decided to be a programmer. Couldn't tell me the first thing about programming but I could tell he had the chops to figure things out and that he had a passion for things getting done.
It’s come full circle. I’ve often heard people (working developers) say over the years that software engineers are basically just digital plumbers. And the job often feels that way. Now we have proof that the skills do in fact overlap quite a bit with plumbing.
It’s a small sample size, but highly motivated self taught folks who come from tough blue collar careers that I’ve seen have been pretty reliable and committed.<p>I presume it’s a lot easier to appreciate the working conditions and compensation package, as well as tolerate the political dramas, when you have some perspective on how life is for most other people.
"Until I met Daniel, I actually didn't know that "smoke testing" was a term with a literal smoke-related meaning. I'd always heard it used in the context of software tests. Daniel used a tracing technique to follow a problem to its source, instead of just making random guesses."<p>I've always known "smoke testing" to refer to the mythical magic smoke that makes all electronics work. Smoke testing is turning something on for the first time to see if you're going to let the magic smoke out.
> One minute he was wrangling sewer pipelines - the next minute, CI/CD pipelines<p>I've seen CI/CD configs where you couldn't tell the difference! :)
I've seen carpenters at work. I'm not a carpenter myself. Whenever a carpenter would explain their thought process to me it felt like two things:<p>* I don't understand their technical terms.<p>* The way they explain their thought process when something goes wrong, feels very much like software engineers fixing a bug.<p>There are differences but this, to me, was the most striking similarity.
If companies truly care about diversity of thought as they say they do, there is a massive untapped group who really bring fresh perspectives: older career-changers.<p>I might be biased as I belong to that group, but I have met some fantastic people from that group.
Inspiring story if you don't already work "in cloud" but as someone with a decade of experience, it somehow has an opposite effect on me. This story highlights how un-glamorous our job can be: tracking down (memory) leaks, fixing (bit) rotten hardware and obsessing over (code) smells, etc. It makes me want to quit.
Between "Amazon Web Services" and "Plumbing" he lists "Backflow Prevention and Cross Connection Control Inspector/Tester" and... I'm not quite sure if that's a cloud architecture skill or a plumbing skill!
This is great. Occasionally I wonder what I'd be doing if I weren't a software developer. I suspect I'd be a mediocre car mechanic. I'd be great at the weird and interesting problems, but bored to tears by the standard, unchallenging work. And crabby about it, of course.
> His reasoning: "Wherever sewer odor can get in, so can smoke … except we can see smoke with a flashlight."<p>Anyone else get the urge to build a smell detector machine with an arduino or rpi?
Just to be clear, running smoke through a sewer line is not a genius move, just standard practice: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IpLABJw2KU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IpLABJw2KU</a><p>But certainly finding problems in old systems is a valuable skill, and it requires a willingness to do dirty work that many folks turn their nose up at, so to speak.
tl;dr - It's a promo post for a book (at 50% off no less) and its author.<p>The direct link to the greatest resume on question is this - <a href="https://dsresume.com" rel="nofollow">https://dsresume.com</a>