Scott Sosna

CORE

Senior Software Engineer II at Datasite

Saint Paul, US

Joined Jul 2010

https://scottsosna.com

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Reputation:	743
Pageviews:	135.4K
Articles:	21
Comments:	1

Articles
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Articles

The Impact of Technical Ignorance

Often, engineers and technologists are blamed for technical problems and tech debt, and while true to a degree, ignorance among non-techies definitely contributes.

February 21, 2024

· 2,324 Views · 4 Likes

Return To Office Insanity

Return-to-office mandates are all the rage, but why? Financial impact usually touted, but now proven to not be. So what is it? And will I eventually have to relent?

February 6, 2024

· 1,199 Views · 1 Like

Pull Requests and Tech Debt

We all do pull requests, but are we doing them right? However well-intentioned, pull requests can actually contribute to tech debt when you're not careful!

January 11, 2024

· 1,955 Views · 2 Likes

Non-Functional Testing

Non-functional testing compliments functional testing, but can anyone actually explain what problem you're testing for? I thought not...

January 2, 2024

· 2,619 Views · 4 Likes

Me, a Conference Speaker? Yes, You!

You may not have considered speaking at a conference, you may think you have nothing unique to offer, but I disagree: your story is just as important as others.

August 22, 2023

· 4,065 Views · 6 Likes

Performance Reviews Are A Waste of Time

Employee performance reviews are fairly pervasive for most jobs, but have you ever asked yourself what is achieved?

August 4, 2023

· 5,938 Views · 6 Likes

Probing Questions for Your Interview

It's difficult to learn much about a potential employer during interviews but improve your chances by asking questions intended to extract info from the interviewer.

July 13, 2023

· 3,965 Views · 5 Likes

Graph Databases and Baseball

Baseball is a statistics-driven sport and has been since its inception. Can a graph database be used to further analyze the data? You'd be surprised...

July 6, 2023

· 3,421 Views · 7 Likes

It's Elementary Privacy, Watson!

How a book of children's academic records from the 1940s got me considering privacy issues concerning non-digital record keeping.

June 27, 2023

· 1,922 Views · 3 Likes

Non-Traditional Project Planning

Many different ways of project planning exist. Many are discarded as unworkable, but there is no universal way to plan a project and ensure success.

June 21, 2023

· 4,762 Views · 8 Likes

Dependent Feature Flags

Most engineers view feature flags as simple on/off checks, but other possibilities, like dependent flags, can release new functionality more safely.

June 15, 2023

· 2,980 Views · 4 Likes

Software Shops and Name Recognition

Do your technology friends have no idea that your company even exists, much less what they do? Unable to attract talent? Perhaps they need some name recognition.

June 12, 2023

· 2,886 Views · 3 Likes

Personalized Code Searches Using OpenGrok

Improve your efficiency by deploying OpenGrok to provide code search capabilities on just the code you're interested in and not everything available.

June 6, 2023

· 5,028 Views · 3 Likes

Understanding Dependencies...Visually!

Whether from the command line or within an IDE, understanding your project's dependencies is challenging because it's text-based. Are there alternatives?

June 5, 2023

· 4,692 Views · 5 Likes

From On-Prem to SaaS

What happens when your organization prefers a software-as-a-service business model and your existing on-premise customers don't?

June 1, 2023

· 2,774 Views · 2 Likes

Neo4J and Virtual Nodes/Relationships

Let's take a look at Neo4j and virtual nodes and relationships.

October 1, 2019

· 13,256 Views · 4 Likes

Analyzing US Lobbying Data in Neo4J

Let's analyze US lobbying data in Neo4j.

September 23, 2019

· 11,320 Views · 6 Likes

Loading US Lobbying Data Into Neo4J

Let's see how to load US lobbying data into Neo4j.

September 16, 2019

· 8,497 Views · 5 Likes

Spring Cloud Config and Self-Signed Certificates

What is a Spring Cloud Config? And how can I implement it with a self-signed certificate?

November 28, 2018

· 12,817 Views · 3 Likes

Intro to Querying Neo4j Using OGM

Let's take a look at how to add examples of querying the data that was loaded in the previous article.

August 15, 2018

· 8,601 Views · 3 Likes

Introduction to Neo4j OGM

View this sample project that creates family members as Neo4j nodes and establishes marriage and parent-child between them.

Updated July 17, 2018

· 9,592 Views · 5 Likes

Comments

Performance Reviews Are A Waste of Time

Oct 19, 2023 · Scott Sosna

I'd say keeping teams moving towards a common goal and succeeding is due to open and consistent communications with the team, making sure everyone has the context of why, when, how, etc., but isn't IMO the purpose of a performance review (correctly done or not).