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1. Wear Sunscreen
This essay is part of my 42 Deep Thoughts project. Originally directed towards the class of ‘97 Mary Schmich wrote an essay which began with these epic words: “Wear sunscreen.” “If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists,…
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0. On Being 42, and the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything
As a person who is now 42, I feel like I’m supposed to know all the answers. I remember being nine and thinking that I now have a framework for all knowledge. To clarify, I didn’t think I knew everything, just that I sorta understood how things connected together, and how to fill in the…
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Yet Another Website Relaunch
Throughout my career I have relaunched this site quite a few times. I’ve used it to explore new web technologies that I can then then leverage on my job. The first jackreichert.com site I launched was when I moved from Israel to New York. It was a portfolio of the work I had done. I…
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A Software Engineer’s Guide to Giving Feedback that Actually Matters
Originally posted on Shopify Engineering. A friend of mine used to get into heated debates all the time. This was before Twitter—well before. Now when you talk to him you would never be able to tell. I asked him to share with me his secret for how he was able to overcome that urge. He…
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Star of David
This is a Star of David. It is a symbol of pride for my people, adopted by the movement born out of our need for self determination in our ancestral homeland after millennia of exile and persecution — the Zionist movement. The chant of hope my people spoke, during the darkest nights, during pogroms, holocaust,…
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Dignity in Tech
In my senior year of high school I taught myself HTML. That was right after HTML4 came out, and it made more complicated web designs possible. I had to lay out images using tables, but I could still do it. I was learning Pascal in school and took to coding like a dog to a…
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A Year of Shakespeare
I spent this past year reading all the plays of Shakespeare. Each has five acts, a play runs 2-3 hours, an act can be read in 30-45 minutes. There are 38 plays, so you can read a play a week and finish well within a year. I spent most evenings reading an act, often listening…
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Quality First
What does that mean? It means that I get grumpy if I need to keep waking up because something wasn’t built well. But if you want to ignore MY feelings, you can bet that your customers will feel grumpy too if they need to use your service and something isn’t working. In short: You want…
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Technical Interviews
I’ve gotten compliments on the technical challenges I’ve set up for applicants interviewing to join my team… from the applicants themselves. People don’t always perform well with an audience, and rarely do we code in front of others during our day-to-day. Pair Programing is an over-looked powerful practice, it helps a ton with these anxieties,…