Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 14th November 2012

What are the best practices for onboarding new software engineers?

I’m a huge fan of “deploy on the first day”—which forces the issue in getting all of their accounts set up, their development environment ready, showing them where source control is, how code review works and so on. Even if it’s just adding themselves to the about page or humans.txt file, it means they can come in on day two ready to get real work done.

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How can I practice giving presentations / public speaking?

Look out for opportunities to practice in front of a friendly audience. There are two event formats that are particularly good for this.

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To become a better developer ? To read more OR to create/contribute to open source projects?

Contribute to an existing project, rather than starting one yourself. There are a bunch of benefits:

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What are the ways to get your links expand in Twitter inline?

This feature is called Twitter Cards - you need to add some metadata to your pages, then apply to Twitter for inclusion in the program (they currently operate a whitelist of sites). See the documentation for more details.

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2012 » November

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