Sam Trammel Blogs

 “How hard can it be to find a new Java developer?” I was asked this question by our engineering director, frustrated with my lack of progress in finding a new software developer for our project. By then, I had interviewed several candidates and concluded they would not be successful in the role. Our team found a good fit a couple of weeks after the nudge, so I never had to explain the real reason why I did not recommend the previous candidates. It was us, not them. My reservation, which I helped the candidates understand, is that while they could meet the immediate requirements of the project — we would be fortunate to have them aboard — working with our technology stack was not an optimal choice for them in the long run. With enough time passed and that entire project no longer active, I can explain my assessment using a structured framework. In this story, I explain that framework and share a couple of personal anecdotes illustrating why it is relevant whether you are starting o...

Yikes. Let’s skip straight to the neuroscience this year, shall we? Even this one small area of human endeavour has not escaped the forces unleashed by tech bros who think ethics are something that happen to other people. A once thriving neuroscience Twitter community dissolved thanks to He Who Shall Not Be Named, the battle-hardened remaining to rail against the dying of the light, others scattered to other platforms, sadly disconnected from one another. ChatGPT and its ilk, tools of such potential, also brought with them a wave of garbage science, including tranches of grammatically-correct, woefully-poor student essays, full of fun facts about studies that did not happen: did you know, for example, about Geoff Schoenbaum’s primate studies on decision making? And yet, science prevails. This machine for creating knowledge moves at such pace and fury that even Musk is but a pebble causing a scant ripple in its flow. As you’ll see, we’ve learnt a lot about the brain this year, about wha...