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My First BillG Review (2006)
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…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 33 posts.
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The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)
This article is part of a 3-part series on trimodal compensation: * Part 1: The trimodal nature of software engineering salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021, this article) * Part 2: The trimodal nature of tech compensation revisited (2024, this article) * Part 3: The trimodal nature of tech compensation in
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Are We Really Engineers? (2021)
This is part one of the Crossover Project. Part two is here and part three is here. A conference talk based on this work is now available here. I sat in front of Mat, idly chatting about tech and cuisine. Before now, I had known him mostly for his cooking pictures on Twitter, the kind that made me envious of…
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EA: The Human Story (2004)
My significant other works for Electronic Arts, and I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse. EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging…
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Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
Archived MIT Admissions blog post 'We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles,' published March 28, 2022. Preserved for historical context; not maintained as current admissions policy.
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Eliminating Toil
Learn what toil is in SRE, how it affects operational work, and why minimizing it is crucial for efficiency and morale.
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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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Meta lays off 11,000 people
Mark Zuckerberg shares some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history.
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New Year, New CEO
It’s a new year, and I’ve decided it’s a good time to replace myself as the CEO of Signal. I have now been working on Signal for almost a decade. It has always been my goal for Signal to grow and sustain beyond my involvement, but four years ago that would still not have been possible. I was writ...
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Fix it, Fork it, Fuck off (2019)
I write and publish open source code. I quite often get bug fixes, patches, requests and questions regarding the things I have published. Most of the feedback is respectful and helpful. However …
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The silent majority of experts (2012)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Burnout
What do we actually know about burnout? What does the research say? Is burnout preventable? All the research, in one free, updated place.
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Unlearning perfectionism
A way out from the perfectionism trap
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I got a computer science degree in 3 months for less than $5000 (2020)
Software developer based in Montréal, Canada
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We will never have enough software developers (2020)
Developers are dropping out of the profession in large numbers despite efforts to grow the number of computer science graduates and software engineers.
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Bye Twitter – Manu Cornet
Manu Cornet's personal website.
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Misidentifying talent
Out of context, you might think they were scouting actors or models, but these are baseball players ("A" is Lloyd Moseby, "B" is Jim Abbott, and "C" is Derek Jeter), ones that were quite good (Lloyd Moseby was arguably only a very good player for perhaps four years, but that makes him extraordinary compared to most…
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The case against CS master’s degrees
Around half of all software engineers are self-taught, One way to approximate this number is via the Stack Overflow developer survey . Another rough approximation comes from the fact that over the last decade, typically only 40-60K students graduated each year with a CS major from a US university, whereas the total…
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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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Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers
Which companies pay for oncall, and how much? Philosophies across the industry for paying for standby duty and numbers from 80 companies.
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Writing for Engineers
This article is available as Korean- (thanks to longfin ) and Chineese- (thanks to webup ) translation.
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Apple Interview – 1995
In the 1990’s, I had access to the early internet (before the web) and made use of a public forum ( Usenet ) where I could ask and respond to questions about programming the Macintosh computer. I’ve mentioned before how this caught the attention of engineering at Apple ( Tom Dowdy , in any event). Perhaps too, the…