Category Archives: Culture

Boxed primitives and ==

By Dave Copeland in Best Practice, Code, Culture | May 27, 2010
One part of programming culture at OPOWER is to program defensively, providing useful information when contracts are violated. What does this have to do with boxed primitives? Getting an assertion message of “Person 1001’s customer id 109032 didn’t match the passed-in customer’s id of 109032″ seemed logically impossible, but was somehow true. But first, let’s [...]

Cinco de Failure

By Tom Vaughan in Culture | May 5, 2010
If you’ve ever seen Yoni or Jeff K, you would know that I have absolutely no chance of competing in a facial-hair competition with them on raw natural talent.  Thus, for the 2010 Cinco de Mustache event, I felt compelled to compete on ingenuity and engineering. To the disgust of myself and my wife, I [...]

Tie Tuesday – more fun that it sounds

By Dave Copeland in Best Practice, Culture | January 19, 2010
The developers have an informal “Tie Tuesday” each work. It’s exactly what it sounds like. And, since you asked, yes, it is more fun to wear a tie when you don’t have to. Not everyone does it every week, but this week, we had the best participation yet: Riley Dawg participates in tie tuesday Continue reading ...

A year-long analysis of snack consumption

By Dave Copeland in Culture | August 26, 2009
Consistently, month after month, the chips that get left in the giant ‘box-o-free-snacks’ are: Nacho Cheese Doritos. Honorable Mentions: Fritos and Cool Ranch Doritos.… Continue reading ...

The Cheated Frogs of Vim

By Tom Vaughan in Culture, Development | August 20, 2009
We're still too small of a company to have more than 1 or 2 logical groupings of the development team, and before today they've been basically "the web team" and "everyone else."  Of course, there's a lot of cross-pollination and everything nowadays ultimately manifests itself somehow as "'web". Still, the "everyone else" paint brush was wearing thin.  In addition to the "web team", we had "the scale team" (a.k.a "Ops R&D") and "the AMI team" and "the core team" and "the report team". . .but most of those were "teams" averaged size 1 and their membership varied from iteration-to-iteration.