Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 41 posts.
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…
There's a bit more below, but I also wrote a follow-up 5 years after the illustrated guide which may be of interest -- HOWTO: Get tenure .
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
The word is out that I have decided to resign my tenured faculty job at Harvard to remain at Google. Obviously this will be a big change in ...
2020 PREFACE: I originally wrote this back in the mid-2000s and have resurrected it by request.
If there’s one thing I’ve been surprised by while trying to start startups, it’s the extent to which the business landscape is shaped by law. Skin Cancer One of my first serious s…
No. Thanks for understanding. Ok that was the nutshell version. If that answers your question, that's great. The more detailed answer ...
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
I am posting this as a MBA Mondays post. But I did not learn this little lesson at business school. I learned it from a very experienced venture capitalist early in my post-MBA career. I was working on a CEO search for one of our struggling portfolio comapnies. We had a bunch of them. I […]
A guide to surviving graduate school, from the perspective of what I wished I had known at the start but had to learn the hard way instead.
There was a Simpsons episode, I can’t recall correctly, but I think Bart recorded Lisa when her heart broke and he watched it in slow motion to stop exactly at that point. I thought of this e…
I officially joined Engine Yard on January 1, 2008, about a week before we announced our Series A funding, becoming its twenty-second employee. I was Engine Yard's very first "Engineering" hire, and I would spend the next year working on Ezra's Merb project, finally releasing Merb 1.
Business is noisy. Business is full of people worrying loudly about projects, processes, and other people. These people have opinions, and they share them all
Starting a side gig during your 9-to-5: Avoid legal issues and maximize success.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Today marks the end of a crazy six year journey for me at Microsoft. I clearly remember my brutal first 8 months at this company as I worked with lawyers, marketing folks and execs to figure out if and how we could release IronPython as an open source project from Microsoft. The final approval for that release came…
The most common comment in this long and complicated MBA Mondays series on Employee Equity is the question of how much equity should you grant when you make a hire. I am going to try to address that question in this post. First, a caveat. For your first key hires, three, five, maybe as much […]
The other day someone sent me an IM and thanked me for my open source contributions. They then said something about wishing they had my gem/code creation…
