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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?
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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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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The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster
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
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Strangler pattern, a powerful simple concept to do refactoring
Inspired by the strangler figs in Australia, a strangler fig application gradually draws behavior out of its host legacy application
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Being Glue
Slides and notes for the Being Glue talk.
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Cannot Measure Productivity
It is impossible to measure the effectiveness of tools and techniques in software development because we have no way of measuring our output, and thus our productivity.
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Seven steps to remarkable customer service
As a bootstrapped software company, Fog Creek couldn’t afford to hire customer service people for the first couple of years, so Michael and I did it ourselves. The time we spent helping customers t…
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bliki: Frequency Reduces Difficulty
"If it hurts - do it more often". Good advice if the amount of pain raises exponentially with the time between actions, such as for integrating software.
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Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
The design of "technical interviews" is hurting the tech sector.
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Productivity
I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets...
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Agile: 5 years later and you're still doing it wrong
Which values of the Agile Manifesto do you find foolish? If you're going to tar and feather it(Agile), maybe you should start at the source.
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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
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Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
Last week, Owen Thomas wrote a flattering article over at Business Insider on how we handle errors and mistakes at Etsy. I thought...
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Back to Basics
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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Markets, discrimination, and "lowering the bar"
Public discussions of discrimination in tech often result in someone claiming that discrimination is impossible because of market forces. Here's a quote from Marc Andreessen that sums up a common view 1 .
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Finding Great Developers
Where are all those great developers? The first time you try to fill an open position, if you’re like most people, you place some ads, maybe browse around the large online boards, and get a ton of …
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Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering
Apple and Microsoft have always disagreed in how to display fonts on computer displays. Today, both companies are using sub-pixel rendering to coax sharper-looking fonts out of typical low res…
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Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists
Did you invest in 10 years of medical school and training? What if you'd bought bitcoin and sat on the beach instead?
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Human Task Switches Considered Harmful
When you’re managing a team of programmers, one of the first things you have to learn to get right is task allocation. That’s just a five-dollar word for giving people things to do. It&…