The Professional Programmer

We've all done it before. As a recovering academic, it was practically part of my job description: work until complete burnout. But if you want to have a long, productive career then you need to be sure you take care of yourself. Here are a few things I make sure to do now that I didn't necessarily do in the past.

Last week I was traveling to a conference, and realized (due, in small part, to my "companions" on the flight home) that it might be worthwhile to write-up my personal etiquette rules for airline travel. Whether it's for work or leisure, there are a few rules that everyone should keep in mind.

If you spend enough time in technology, it becomes inevitable. Travel. It seems so glamorous at first. Your company is willing to spend what is sometimes non-trivial sums of money to send you off to some new location, where you will be their representative to the hundreds or thousands of other people attending the meeting or conference. Then the realization occurs: How do I make the most of my conference time?

I have two young children at home, one of whom is school age. If your home is anything like mine, mornings and evenings sometimes descend into chaos . Sometimes it seems like the evening ends and my wife and I have forgotten to eat dinner, but we're too tired to bother. Mornings are sometimes the same way: wake up 2 hours before we need to head out the door, and still somehow manage to run 10 minutes "late" (late is relative here - we always get our oldest to school on time, but we don't always leave the house at the target time). Regardless of your life situation, stuff happens. It's inevitable. But you can do some things to make the one-offs a little less frantic.

I don't know if this is the case for other technologists, but I spend a lot of time in meetings. Most of these meeting are constructive, albeit some more than others. I think it's important that people be able to hold effective meetings, and I've compiled a few pointers to help people ensure their meetings are successful.

Earlier today my family was on the road returning from a family wedding when we decided to stop for lunch. Needless to say, it didn't go spectacularly well (my Twitter rants are rare, and only occur when something has really set me off):

At some point, many developers and technologists will have the opportunity to be briefed on information that is not publicly available. Companies use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) as a legal mechanism to make sure that trade secrets are actually kept secret.