[This is an excerpt from Debugging Teams, written by Ben Collins-Sussman and myself. If you like it, we suggest buying a copy for yourself. And your manager. And your team.]

Be Honest.

This doesn’t mean we’re assuming you are lying to your team, but it merits a mention because you’ll inevitably find yourself in a position where you can’t tell your team something or, even worse, you have to tell them something they don’t want to hear. …

[This is an excerpt from Debugging Teams, written by Ben Collins-Sussman and myself. If you like it, we suggest buying a copy for yourself. And your manager. And your team.]

Work in any big company long enough and you’ll find yourself in a position where you need to email an executive (or any busy person you don’t know) to ask them for something. Perhaps you need something for your product or team, or you are looking to right a wrong. Whatever the case, this is likely the first time you’ve ever communicated with this person. …

Update: Badge Reviews is now a website!

I’ve spoken at hundreds of conferences in the course of my career and the one thing that most of them have in common is crappy name badges.

I came face-to-face with this problem when Zach and I started running ORD Camp ten years ago: we started off with crappy name badges. Realizing that this was something we could control, I started thinking about what makes a good conference name badge and why. …

When the remixed version of Sgt. Peppers was released a few weeks ago, I paid no attention. I’ve had way too many of my favorite albums and artists released and re-released and remastered to fall yet again for what I thought was just another marketing trick to squeeze a few more bucks out of a band’s aging (but brilliant!) catalog.

I could not possibly have been more wrong.

It was Michael Sippey’s article On the remixed Sgt Pepper that pushed me over the edge. …

The real question is: what do you do then?

Tock has two payment plans: The preferred plan is a flat-rate monthly plan where restaurants can book an unlimited number of reservations with no additional charges. The second — for small restaurants (think omakase, chef’s counter, etc.) charges a low base fee and a per-person fee on top of that.

Katie, a member of Tock’s hospitality team, was running some reports on our billing system. She wanted to see if we had any restaurants on our “per-person” plan that were doing enough business that it would be cheaper for them to…

Many years ago, back in the late 90’s, I worked on a large software project with some friends, including Ben Collins-Sussman, Lęfty Wałkowiak, and Karl Fogel. The software was for A Very Big Bank, and part of the project required writing out a custom CD-ROM for each of their big corporate customers every month. The CD was basically a website that included a whole bunch of transactions, along with detailed information about each, and served as a kind of local, static supplement to the fancy webapp that we built for them.

So, if a customer requested (and paid for, of…

If you’re a popular restaurant using OpenTable, you’re likely paying them thousands of dollars a year more than they deserve. And I’m going to show you how they’re doing it.

It’s fairly well known in the restaurant world that OpenTable charges restaurants $0.25 for bookings made via their widget on a restaurant’s website. And that they charge restaurants $1.00 for bookings made via OpenTable’s website. OpenTable claims that this higher fee is because they’re bringing new customers to restaurants from the OpenTable “network.” …

I have a major in Latin and a minor in Greek. Oh, and my backup plan in case that didn’t work out: I got the equivalent of a minor in Fine Arts and Ceramics.

Since it’s relatively widely known that I’ve been building software and engineering teams for 22 years without actually getting an engineering degree, it is with some frequency that I get questions like this:

How does someone who doesn’t have a computer science degree get the attention of your HR hiring folks?

The short answer that many of them don’t want to hear is: you don’t. You…