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How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)
In this post, I describe the phenomenon of the so-called expert beginner -- someone with mediocre skill who thinks he's an expert.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 39 posts.
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The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect (2008)
[ Updated (06/16/08): Here’s a real-world project review memo , written several years ago, that described (among many other things) the Dead Sea effect. ]
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95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.
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Guide to Equity Compensation
Stock options, RSUs, job offers, and taxes—a detailed reference, including hundreds of resources, explained from the ground up, for both employees and managers.
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Reversing the technical interview (2017)
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
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Staff archetypes
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders…
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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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Being Glue
Slides and notes for the Being Glue talk.
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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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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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Simplicity
Donald Norman concludes that simplicity is overrated: “But when it came time for the journalists to review the simple products they had gathered together, they complained that they lacke…
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Is TDD Dead? (2014)
A series of conversations between Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Martin Fowler. We discuss Test-Driven Development (TDD) and its impact upon software design.
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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
This is a time of change for the internet and for Mozilla. From combatting a lethal virus and battling systemic racism to protecting individual privacy —
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Unifying the Technical Interview
Aisha’s hands rattle you. They float gently in front of her shoulders, wrists cocked back. One sways cheerfully as she banters with the hiring manager—her lacquered nails a cyan mosaic over ochre palms. They flit, then hover momentarily as the two women arrange lunch. When the door closes, Aisha slaps her fingertips…
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Bye, Amazon
May 1 st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
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How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You
Best practices for code review when you’re the author.
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Design Docs at Google
One of the key elements of Google's software engineering culture is the use of design docs for defining software designs. These are...
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We at $Famous_company switched to $Hyped_technology
Saagar Jha's website.
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On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
On this week's Under the Radar, Marco and Dave eloquenty discussed Apple's piss-poor documentation.
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Write Libraries, Not Frameworks
Normally when I write about something on here I take the time to fully think-out a point, make a case, address all the major sides of the issue that I can think of, etc.
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I Was Google’s Head of International Relations
The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.
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Writing a book: is it worth it?
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book . Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming…
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If management isn't a promotion, then engineering isn't a demotion
I wrote a piece this week about what motivates people to become managers (tldr mostly org dysfunction), and Julian Dunn replied with some typically insightful tweets:
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Your statement is correct but misses the point
Let's assume that there is a discussion going on on the Internet about programming languages. One of the design points that come up is a gar...
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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...