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Maximizing Developer Effectiveness
To be successful at digital transformation you need to optimize the key feedback loops in your software engineering organization
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 648 posts.
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They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken
They Might Never Tell You It's Broken
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Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over The Technical Interview lately. Many people realize that inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard has basically zero correlation to whether or not someone is actually a good software developer. The most effective programming test anyone’s come up with is still Fizzbuzz. One…
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I am not a supplier
For the past few years, we have seen a lot of discussions around the concept of the Software Supply Chain. These discussions started around the time of LeftPad and escalated with multiple incidents in the past few years. The problem of all the work in this domain is that it forgets a fundamental point.
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What I Learned From Increasing My Prices
Last month Bidsketch had the biggest increase in revenue it’s ever had. Before that, the biggest increase in revenue came when FreshBooks emailed a million people and mentioned Bidsketch as a new integration for sales proposals. I got so many new sales notifications that day, I thought someone had hacked my server. It…
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Blind since birth, writing code at Amazon since 2013
Michael Forzano said he has a good “mental map of the structure of the code,” which allows him to help colleagues and provide unique feedback to his team.
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Microsoft to lay off 10k workers
We're living through times of significant change.
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How to Get into Natural Language Processing
We’re excited to introduce a new series we’re calling Paths [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/category/paths/]. Each post will outline an emerging technology and give you clear steps on how to get started in that field. This series was designed with makers and aspiring entrepreneurs in mind. We talked to college…
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Four Hours of Concentration
As I've blogged about before, and mentioned again in my previous post, the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré put in two hours of work in the morning and two in the evening. Apparently this is a common pattern. Cal Newport mentions this in his interview with Todd Henry. Now we also know that if
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I Have No Talent
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…
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Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Overflow CEO
Last March, I shared that we were starting to look for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. We were looking for that rare combination of someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth…
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Was there a tech-hiring bubble? Job postings data suggest so
We recently discussed Information industry jobs data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: That post showed that layoffs in Information were elevated relative to layoffs for non-farm employment overall...
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Discipline Doesn’t Scale
If programmers were just more disciplined, more professional, they'd write better software. All they need is a code of conduct telling them how to work like those of us who've worked it out. The above statement is true, which is a good thing for those of us interested in improving the state of software and...
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Why you can't hire
There isn’t a shortage of developers and designers. There’s a surplus of founders. The cost of starting a company has collapsed. It’s now just (minimal) salaries. For entrepreneurs, desks are free, hosting is free, marketing is online, and company setup is cheap. Raising the first $25K for product development is easy…
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The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom
Why do teachers quit? As I make the tough decision to leave the classroom, I highlight some of the issues that force quality teachers to leave public education.
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Reviewing Steve Yegge's Prediction Record
I try to avoid making predictions 1 . It's a no-win proposition: if you're right, hindsight bias makes it look like you're pointing out the obvious. And most predictions are wrong. Every once in a while when someone does a review of predictions from pundits, they're almost always wrong at least as much as you'd expect…
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Eight Years at Roblox
I joined Roblox at the end of 2012 as a rendering engineer; I had just spent more than a year working on various titles from FIFA franchise after years of console game development and was becoming a bit tired of the “big game development”. My work on FIFA was as a contractor and I got an offer for a full-time…
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