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How GitHub Works: Hours are Bullshit
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 520 posts.
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Two Weeks Vacation is only a Recommendation, not a Rule
How much vacation time did you take last year? If you're like most workers in the States, it was probably less than 3 weeks. That's all your...
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Working for a Dating Website (2015)
Over this past weekend, I came across a Wired called "Write the Perfect Email to Anyone with this Creepy Site" on using machine learning and natural language processing to analyze a person's social media profiles and offer tips on how to communicate with them effectively. Most people immediately thought about sales…
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Broken Ownership
In the ownership trio, we discussed 3 elements: Knowledge, Mandate and Responsibility. This article digs into various broken ownership scenarios where 1-2 of those elements are missing, what are the common symptoms and how to fix them.
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The joys of maintenance programming (2011)
In the old days when I started programming, green programmers trying to build their skills and get experience started out doing maintenance programming. Only the old hands got to write new code. The newbies cut their teeth debugging and fixing musty old code that still worked for the business. I’ve done my share of…
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Don't give bullshit advice
I chatted with a young guy last night about his new startup idea. He’s got a vision for a social commerce app with a few cool spins on it. As I listened to him, I was thinking about how I had heard this exact pitch half a dozen times before. I also knew I had a lot to offer him in terms of help. I have a good friend…
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Jeff Bezos: Regret Minimization Framework
I went to my boss and said to him, “You know, I’m going to go do this crazy thing and I’m going to start this company selling books online.” This was something that I had already been talking to him about in a sort of more general context, but then he said, “Let’s go on a walk.” And, we went on a two hour walk in…
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"Can you solve this problem for me on the whiteboard?"
Jim is a great chef. He's too modest to say that about himself, but he's worked either as head chef or assistant head chef at a number of re...
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Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)
The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?
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How to Pay Professional Maintainers
To successfully fund Open Source projects, companies should: pay the maintainers; pay them real money; pay for maintenance; and keep paying them.
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How to sell your software for $20,000
I guess you can either sell $20 software to 10,000 people a year, or $20,000 software to one business a year that buys 10 seats, and either ...
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Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist
People often ask me if I’m a talent agent for engineers, in the same way that actors have talent agents in Hollywood. In a lot of ways, the way I work is closer to a talent agent than a traditional recruiter — rather than sourcing for specific positions, I try to find smart people first, […]
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Sacrificial Architecture
Sometimes it's a good thing to be writing code that you expect to throw away in a couple of years time.
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Stéphane Graber has left Canonical
Stéphane Graber's website -
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Why code review beats testing: evidence from decades of programming research
tl;dr If you want to ship high quality code, you should invest in more than one of formal code review, design inspection, testing, and quality assurance. Testing catches fewer bugs per hour than human inspection of code, but it might be catching different types of bugs.
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A Day of Communication at GitHub
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human
Lately, I’ve been reading articles about best practices for code reviews. I notice that these articles focus on finding bugs to the exclusion of almost every…
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Why I Left the .NET Framework
The .NET Framework was good. Really good. Until it wasn’t. Why did I leave .NET? In short, it constrained our ability to choose (which is a huge deal for
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