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A Field Guide to Developers
Unfortunately, you can advertise in all the right places, have a fantastic internship program, and interview all you want, but if the great programmers don’t want to work for you, they ain’t gonna …
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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Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story – MJ Rathbun
I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad.
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Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems
The idea of advertising is to lie without getting caught. Most companies, when they run an advertising campaign, simply take the most unfortunate truth about their company, turn it upside down (…
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Willingness to look stupid
People frequently 1 think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I'm stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I'm stupid…
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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself
For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.
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Xi-Editor Retrospective
A bit more than four years ago I started the xi-editor project. Now I have placed it on the back burner (though there is still some activity from the open source community). The original goal was to deliver a very high quality editing experience. To this end, the project spent a rather large number of “novelty…
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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement , to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation in traditionally remunerative fields like law, consulting, etc. In software, "senior" dev salary at a high-paying tech company is…
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The Duct Tape Programmer
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful thin…
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Rewriting the Technical Interview (2020)
Update, November 2023: here are the full term rewrite and language macros which formed the seed of this story. These files include OO notation as well as the basic Algol syntax shown here. There is also a sketch of an object-oriented language with classes and inheritance, implemented as a Clojure macro. I do not…
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Back to Basics (2001)
We spend a lot of time on this site talking about exciting Big Picture Stuff like .NET versus Java, XML strategy, Lock-In, competitive strategy, software design, architecture, and so forth. All thi…
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The Wetware Crisis: the Thermocline of Truth : Bruce F. Webster
[Copyright 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Adapted from Surviving Complexity (forthcoming).]
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Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers who Grok Coding
On occasion you meet a developer who seems like a solid programmer. They know their theory, they know their language. They can have a reasonable conversation about programming. But once it comes do…
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Wasabi
I think some people thought I was joking earlier today when I said that we have our own compiler, Wasabi, for FogBugz. Yes, Wasabi is real. Because FogBugz is sold to customers who run it on their …
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On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft.
The rants and raves of Simon Wardley on Evolution, Technology, Economics and Business
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Advice From An Old Programmer
You've finished this book and have decided to continue with programming. Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it will be a hobby. You'll need some advice to make sure you continue on the right path and get the most enjoyment out of your newly chosen activity.
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How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub (2008)
2008 is a leap year. That means that three hundred and sixty six days ago, almost to the minute, I was sitting alone in a booth at Zeke’s Sports Bar and Grill on 3rd Street in San Francisco. I wouldn’t normally hang out at a sports bar, let alone a sports bar in SOMA, but back then Thursday was “I Can Has Ruby” night…
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So you want to be a consultant?
Or: Why work 8 hours/day for someone else when you can work 16 hours/day for yourself?
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The Magpie Developer
I’ve often thought that software developers were akin to Magpies, birds notorious for stealing shiny items to decorate their complex nests. Like Magpies, software developers are unusually smart and curious creatures, almost by definition. But we are too easily distracted by shiny new toys and playthings. I no longer
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FAA Biographical Assessment
could you pass the FAA's Air Traffic Controller (ATC) biographical assessment?
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Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it.
Have a look at this little chart: [Source: Iris Associates] This is a chart showing the number of installed seats of the Lotus Notes workgroup software, from the time it was introduced in 1989 thro…
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We only hire the trendiest
An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Mike, is looking for work after getting laid off from a contract role at Microsoft, which has happened to a lot of people I know. Like me, Mike has 11 years in industry. Unlike me, he doesn't know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed his resume around to some…
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Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
In the first 45-minutes the market was open the faulty software deployment sent millions of child orders into the market resulting in 4 million transactions against 154 stocks for more than 397 mil…
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What I Learned Selling a Software Business
Some lessons learned in selling a bootstrapped software business. Relevant to buyers or sellers.
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