Justin Fuller

How do we work together?

When she was a teacher, on the first day of each class, Lauren, my wife, would start the year with a simple activity. She sat her first or second greaters down around a big sheet of paper, hung on the wall.

Reducing Interview Bias

In 2011, researchers at Ben Gurion University in Israel and Columbia University found Judges’ rulings are affected by lunch breaks. The judges granted 65% of parole requests at the beginning of the day. The rate declined steadily until a lunch break, after which the rate jumped back to 65%. They granted almost no requests at the end of the day.

Everything Is a Product

Your internal tools may have more value than you think they do.

Why do we fall into the rewrite trap?

One of my favorite reads is Joel Spolsky's Things You Should Never Do. He wrote this post almost twenty years ago, outlining the downfall of Netscape and others because they spent years rewriting working code. His solution is, unsurprisingly, to refactor. About a year before Joel wrote Things You Should Never Do, Martin Fowler published his popular book, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. So, my question is, if we as a community figured out — twenty years ago — that we should stop rewriting programs, why is it still commonly done today?

Go Things I Love: Channels and Goroutines

This series, Go Things I Love, is my attempt to show the parts of Go that I like the best, as well as why I love working with it at The New York Times. In my last post Go Things I Love: Methods On Any Type, I demonstrated a feature of Go that makes it easy to build Object-Oriented software. This post, Channels and Goroutines, will demonstrate a few neat concurrency patterns in Go.