Month: September 2015

Fixing Twitter

Fixing Twitter – here’s a reasonable rant on what’s wrong with Twitter and how to fix it.  Product managers and marketing people should definitely read.

Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fиcking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.” It shouldn’t just search for a hashtag–it should use intelligent algorithms to show me all of the relevant content about that event. It should be the place you go to learn about what is happening in the world right now. When something major happens in the world/your country/your city, you should be trained to immediately and automatically think, “open Twitter to get updates.” This is so obvious to me that I wonder what Twitter’s product team has been doing—are they over-designing a solution to this? It’s so simple. 90% of the UI and 80% of the search functionality is already in the app.

On full stack developers

I came across an excellent blog post on full stack developers – “The full stack developer is a myth“.  I do much agree on what is being said there.  Firstly, the stack itself.

Non-exhaustive list of a technical stack layers and components
Non-exhaustive list of a technical stack layers and components

Secondly, on the problem:

A full stack developer is a myth not because none exist, but because the term is meaningless. It’s no different from a coding ninja or rockstar, but at least everyone knows those terms don’t actually mean anything.

Even limiting the term to a more specific context like web stack or mobile stack, you’d still get quite a bit of technology for a single person.  And yes, it’s changing a lot and fast too!

Every year there are new components added to each layer and every couple of years there’s a new layer added to it. Is it really reasonable to put out job applications asking for a full stack developer? It’s not only unreasonable, it’s stupid. Particularly when you start looking for one person who’s an expert in security, web development, UX, and servers; and this isn’t at all an uncommon expectation.

More so, there is a geographical component to this as well.  If you are in a small country like Cyprus, with very few technical establishments, even further down simplifying the stack won’t help you much.  Finding a web developer with good knowledge of HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL is already a challenge.   And that’s like three or four layers…