David Acevedo's Blog

I'd been frustrated and had resigned to give up on using the command line (CLI) on Windows. Alas, the Microsoft product seemed to not have improved since I started using the command line in High School back in the 90's. Clunky and completely lacking super useful tools, like 'which' on Linux/Mac, I'd just abandoned it. I even wrote scripts in Ruby to avoid using the command line in Windows (which is not a bad idea btw). Yet today I found the missing piece. I knew that you could install Cygwin on windows to get a Linux like prompt, but cygwin is a monster of an environment and you essentially have to live inside of it to use it. But I found Gow and all is well. First things first, the terminal or command application on windows sucks. I highly recommend using Console2 , which is a portable application that is way better at giving you a command prompt than anything Windows has by default, and it's free. You can set a start-up directory in it, so you can launch it ...

I was thinking how I like to be a swiss-army knife tech guy. I am studying for the LPI Linux exam, and wondered suddenly why employers don't value an "answers guy" (or gal). You know, a person you can go to with questions and problems and he (or she) can figure out or just knows the answer. Then it struck me that Valve's model kinda does that. I've been reading a lot about the company and I wish there was a case study about them. Their flat management style seems extremely effective and unfortunately unique. Being a private company, it can run its ship however it wants so Valve runs it in an interesting way. They don't hire people for particular jobs. They hire people and basically let them figure out where they can contribute the most. Desk have wheels because on a project per project basis you may be moving around forming different teams. It sounds like an Agile-dream workplace. But a key here is not the way they work but how they hire. While they look for...

So today again I've been drawn into reading another article on what should you put or not put on your resume article. Probably the umpteenth one I've read this year. You get into this self-judgmental dialog: Should I do this? Should I do that? And Oh my God I did it wrong that time! None of that helps. I find it curious how the Job Seeker starts to makes this dance trying to present him or herself as the perfect candidate for a job. Twisting and turning, fixing a resume here, tweaking there. But what does this accomplish? It's patently obvious to me that the process is broken because it treats people like interchangeable cogs. You need an engineer? Then only an engineer will do. I wonder about pople like Robert McNamara who is the subject of the documentary "Fog of War" which I saw this weekend. He went from the government to working for Ford. It was clear he didn't get that job because he had "previous automobile working experience." Yet his c...