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If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
Using AI agents correctly is a process of reviewing code. If you’re good at reviewing code, you’ll be good at using tools like Claude Code, Codex, or the…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
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Things managers do that leaders never would
Simon reveals the subtle but powerful ways leaders set themselves apart from managers—and why those choices matter most in times of crisis.
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A shift in developer culture is impacting innovation and creativity
From tinkerers to metric seekers: How the shift in developer culture is impacting innovation and creativity.
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When the job search becomes impossible
I have the good fortune to have a job right now, but many of my friends are out of work. Most have been searching for a while. Some are encountering a problem that has my full sympathy, something I’ve experienced myself at various times. I’m not sure I can solve it, but maybe I can help put words to what some are…
305
Boring is good
The initial, feverish enthusiasm for large language models (LLMs) is beginning to cool, and for good reason. It’s time to trade the out-of-control hype for a more pragmatic, even “boring,” approach. A recent MIT report shows that 95% of companies implementing this technology have yet to see a positive outcome. It’s…
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Boring work needs tension
We can make our work exciting by chasing the every day tension.
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An open-source maintainer's guide to saying “no”
Stewardship in the age of cheap code
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Becoming the person who does the thing
Bad news: your internal identity dictates everything you do. Good news: you can change it
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You’re a slow thinker. Now what?
Figuring out how to lean in to my thinking style
310
Being good isn't enough
Giving good career advice is hard. Maybe it’s because careers can look more alike than they really are. Two people can have the same title but what helps one...
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Development speed is not a bottleneck
Big part of discussion around vibe coding revolves around pace of development while it was never a key constraint in succeeding with a product.
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You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title
I once had a job interview for a backend position. Their stack was Node.js, MySQL, nothing exotic. The interviewer asked: "If you have an array containing a million entries, how would you sort the dat
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Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership
This tension of what customers are asking for vs what customers really need shows up in areas like resilience. Amazon's "Well-Architected Framework" strongly exhorts customers to avoid building production workloads in a single Availability Zone — but Amazon's cross-AZ bandwidth pricing is painful, and Amazon doesn't…
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Code Is Debt
I like to answer this frequent question by way of an example. An example of two companies. It goes something like this:
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Notes on Managing ADHD
Strategies and tactics for staying productive.
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Flunking my Anthropic interview again
I didn't misclick any buttons. My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.
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How do I get into the game industry
Every now and then someone tells me that their child loves video games and wants to get into the game industry, then asks me how...
318
AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
AI coding has made me much more productive—but at a strange cost. I can't listen to music when I code anymore.
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Dangerous advice for software engineers
I’m a big fan of “sharp tools”. These are tools that are powerful enough to be hugely helpful or harmful, depending on how they’re used. Most forms of direct…
320
Omarchy Is Out
My latest love letter to Linux has been published. It's called Omarchy, and it's an opinionated setup of the Arch Linux distribution and the Hyprland tiling window manager. With everything configured out-of-the-box to give you exactly the same setup that I now run every day. My Platonic ideal of what a developer…
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The cost of interrupted work (2023)
You’ve likely read lots of blog posts stating that it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to work after an interruption, context switch, or meeting. Thus, “do you have five minutes” ends up not only costing those few minutes, but instead about half an hour. But where does that number come from?
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Developer's block
A blog on software development and other stuff
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All managers make mistakes; good managers acknowledge and repair
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” — Leonard Cohen Let me tell you something that will happen after you become a manager: you’re going to mess u…
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How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
you need to sit for this one for 48h
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The Enterprise Experience
Reflections on working in a large enterprise — culture, process, and what I've learned in a year.
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Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity
I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying. I like the premise of it, don’t get me wrong, a resume you don’t need to update all that often seems cool. Unfortunately though, its turned into the worst possible version of itself. It’s a place where people post
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Traps to Developers
HTML and CSS
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The Timmy Trap
This is Part 2 of my LLM series. In Part 1 , I discussed how in just a few short years, we went from the childlike joy of creating “Pirate Poetry” to the despair that our jobs would disappear. My main message was to relax a bit, as companies abuse the hype cycle to distort what is actually happening.
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A case study in bad hiring practice and how to fix it
In this day and age of cybersecurity professionals crying out for roles, we're still seeing companies complain that there is a skills shortage and a lack of talent. A quick scan through your LinkedIn feed will show this is absolute nonsense: there is a mass of experienced, capable talent out there l
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An engineer's perspective on hiring
hiring in tech is broken and everyone knows it. what can we do better?