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Strong software tips from 2000 that are 100% valid today
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…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 34 posts.
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Monolith First (2015)
Going directly to a microservices architecture is risky, so consider building a monolithic system first. Split to microservices when, and if, you need it.
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How to increase your luck surface area (2010)
"Luck Surface Area" is a turn of phrase that popped out my mouth during a discussion episode of TechZing a few months back and is something I've been meaning to write about ever since but never got around to actually doing. However, thanks to Lance Jones who referenced the concept in a recent blog post I have finally…
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Mocks Aren't Stubs (2007)
Explaining the difference between Mock Objects and Stubs (together with other forms of Test Double). Also the difference between classical and mockist styles of unit testing.
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No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
I started Gumroad in 2011. In 2015, we reached a peak of 23 full-time employees. In 2016, after failing to raise more money, I ended up back where I began: a one-person company.
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How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding
Using spaced repetition to create understanding
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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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The Value of In-House Expertise
An alternate title for this post might be, "Twitter has a kernel team!?". At this point, I've heard that surprised exclamation enough that I've lost count of the number times that's been said to me (I'd guess that it's more than ten but less than a hundred). If we look at trendy companies that are within a couple…
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Basecamp's new etiquette regarding societal politics at work
Jason announced a raft of changes we've made to Basecamp earlier today. By far the most controversial is a new etiquette around societal politics at work, and the stances we'll take as a company. So to expand on that, here's a segment from what I wrote internally on that topic, as part of the announcement to employees…
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Changes at Basecamp
At Basecamp, we treat our company as a product. It's not a rigid thing that exists, it's a flexible, malleable idea that evolves. We aren't stuck with what we have, we can create what we want. Just as we improve products through iteration, we iterate on our company too. Recently, we've made some internal company…
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Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity
A common topic of discussion among my close friends is where the bottlenecks are in our productivity and how we can execute more quickly. This is very different from what I see in my extended social circles, where people commonly say that velocity doesn't matter . In online discussions about this, I frequently see…
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I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time
Hello friends! :^) Let me tell you a story…
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Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
A bit of inspiration (and some hopefully actionable advice) for folks who are still working at day jobs.
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Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)
One year ago, I quit my day job to work on Zig full time . Since then, the project has seen a steady growth in funding. Thanks to the people donating, Zig is on track to become fully sustainable before my savings run out.
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If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)
Interviewer: Now comes the part of the interview where we ask a question to test your creative thinking ability. Don’t think too hard about it, just
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Work Hard (2007)
Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced … the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously… this feeling may last for hours at a tim…
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Ship / Show / Ask: A modern branching strategy
Ship/Show/Ask is a branching strategy that helps teams wait less and ship more, without losing out on feedback.
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Embrace the Grind
Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation and a fleet of robots do your bidding. But sometimes, magic is mundane. If you’re willing to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible.
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Individuals Matter
One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't…
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The gift of it's your problem now
Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hund...
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Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs
Edit, 11/20/2023: If you like this post, it inspired a book co-written by me and Liz Zalman. You can find it here. One of my portfolio companies raised a round a few months ago and I left their boa…
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The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
The personal website of Christopher Laing.
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On Hubris and Humility
Last week I gave a talk at the Open Source Firmware Conference about some of the work I’m doing at Oxide Computer, entitled On Hubris and Humility. There is a video of the talk if you’d like to watch it in video form. It came out pretty alright!
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What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
I've worked at various tech companies: from "traditional" shops and consultancies, through an investment bank, to high-growth tech firms. I've also talked with software engineers working at startups, banking, automotive, big tech, and more "traditional" companies. This mix had a healthy sample of Silicon-Valley…
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How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
A survey of how tech projects run across the industry highlights Scrum being absent from Big Tech. Why is this, and are there takeaways others should take note of?
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Apple’s Mistake
While it’s possible to understand Apple’s motivations behind its decision to enable on-device scanning, the company had a better way to satisfy its societal obligations while preserving…
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It takes a PhD to develop that
In light of recent events regarding the performance of the Windows terminal 1 , I thought it would be worth spending some time on this topic, since it uncovers a few problems that are pestering the software industry.