Jovan Cicmil's Blog - Tech

If you’re anything like me, you hate hype and you despise pump-and-dump schemes. Suffice to say, watching kids sell pixelated monkey avatars to each other isn’t exactly the sort of thing I enjoy. At first glance, this is what the much-hyped web3 is: an unregulated marketplace rife for speculation and fraud. A breeding ground for Ponzi schemes and a graveyard for many get-rich-quick ...

Roughly 90% of startups fail. This statistic isn’t surprising, but the way many founders lunge into business, you would think that the failure rate is more like 2%. Having been following the industry for over a decade, I have noticed some patterns — ideas that sound enticing, plausible, or even brilliant. Ideas shiny enough to attract massive investments before crashing into the ground ...

If you asked a random person the question “are software developers rational as a whole”, you would very likely get an affirmative response. That response would show ignorance of the periodic pseudo-religious movements within the industry. One of the current religions is test-driven development. If you write tests after you write the actual code that performs the task at hand, you are now ...

The year 2020 brought about a remote revolution of sorts — whether they wanted to or not, many companies decentralized their operations. This decentralization exposed some challenges of remote work to the wider public. As someone who has worked in several distributed teams over the course of a decade, I’ve watched even the most competent companies struggle to grasp the new ...

Recently, I came across my notes from a technical interview I did back in 2017 with a funded tech startup. The interview consisted of a 30-minute video call, followed by a coding assignment that took about 2 hours, and a 30-minute feedback session the following day. Despite doing well on the call and having a stimulating discussion with their CTO, I did a pretty mediocre job of the coding ...