Looks Good, Works Well

Bringing change in teams is hard work. Bringing change to organizations is hard work. Bringing change to compananies is really hard work. And almost impossible.

Bringing change is about persistance rooted in strong belief in core principles. It is also about improvization. Listening and reflecting. This allows you embrace the problem, not the solution and bring about the real change needed.

I cover seven steps to bringing change:

• Believe something deeply
• Understand the culture
• Fix the pain points
• Rally the

When we starting using Trello for candidate tracking, we were highly motivated to have it handle all our communication and workflow for candidates.

@trello why isn't there a simple way for a user to be notified by email specifically when they get assigned to a card (w/o all other notif)

— Bill Scott (@billwscott) January 25, 2014

One mistake I made early on was subscribing directly to our talent tracking board. And then when I installed the

As we started the new year, we have changed the way we do recruiting at PayPal. We create an always active pipeline based on a few key profiles. We have also started aligning our engineering practices around these profiles (web application, mobile, and services engineering). They don't fit everything of course. But by having profiles we can get really good at talking to great talent and finding the right matches for them and us.

This model is similar to what

Back in the mid 80's after we had finished writing GATO for the Macintosh, I took some time to explore the underbelly of the Mac. One of these times I discovered that a single M68k operation determined the way MacPaint was visually designed.

_{Image courtesy of Jeff Thompson's blog}

This was the time of the Mac 128k and the "Fat Mac", aka, the 512k Mac. Debugging the Mac meant hitting the Programmer's Switch that all of us developers had installed.

If you haven't discovered James Mickens then I have a treat for you. James is a Researcher in the Distributed Systems Group at Microsoft and writes hilarious articles under the moniker ;Login: Logout. His writing reminds me of the style of Dave Barry.

November's article The Night Watch takes a poignant swipe at web developers and web designers when explaining why he needs a systems programmer at his side when the apocolypse comes (something we should all ponder deeply). What

2014 is a great time to join PayPal.

With our move to NodeJS and the release of our open source KrakenJS code base, we are rewriting and redesigning all of our experiences -- all on NodeJS.

Productivity is the Reason

Elsewhere we have written about that move, but the real impetus behind the move is simple -- Developer productivity. Having a single technology stack for the frontend experience is key to accelerating development.

For us settling on NodeJS in the