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An Interview with Zen Chief Architect Mike Clark
Zen is one of the most important microarchitectures in the history of the x86 ecosystem.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
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War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged
All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.
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The Software Engineering Identity Crisis
Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged. AI coding assistants aren’t just changing how we write software - they’re…
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Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015)
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping
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The Frontend Treadmill
A lot of frontend teams are very convinced that rewriting their frontend will lead to the promised land. And I am the bearer of bad tidings. If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the time you spend…
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How I accepted myself into Canada's largest AI hackathon
i <3 firebase
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Stamina Is a Quiet Advantage
Stamina is one of the most universally useful traits you can develop. It's a more broadly applicable advantage than things that are situationally useful.
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Career Advice in 2025
Yesterday, the tj-actions repository, a popular tool used with Github Actions was compromised (for more background read one of these two articles). Watching the infrastructure and security engineering teams at Carta respond, it highlighted to me just how much LLMs can’t meaningfully replace many essential roles of…
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The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet
Don't try to reform science. Not yet. Not in your PhD. In grad school, you'll start complaining about the publishing...
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A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under her:
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How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions? (2023)
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer
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Should managers still code?
Ah, the eternal question, straight from the mailbag.
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Write to Escape Your Default Setting
Writing serves as a foundation for clarity in thought. It can help you engage more deeply with your ideas.
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Freelancing: How I found clients, part 1
tools, tactics, troubles along the way
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The benefits of learning in public
Learning in public helps me grow as an engineer and seems to benefit others too. Here's why I should do more.
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Ask for no, don't ask for yes (2022)
I think it is important to have a bias for action. Like anything else, this is something you can make a habit of. Moving forward allows you to make progress. I don’t know about you, but I’ve frozen up in the past not knowing what the right path was for me. Moving forward, even the smallest possible step, helped break…
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Fast Cash vs. Slow Equity
Knowing what you're building
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20 years working on the same software product
I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has c…
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Users don't care about your tech stack
They care about the product and their needs.
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Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?
There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five years ago. Compared to other industries, job listings for software engineers grew much more in 2021-2022, but have declined much faster since. A look into possible reasons for this, and what could come next.
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Rust, C++, and Python trends in jobs on Hacker News (February 2025)
How are Rust, C++, and Python trending on Hacker News in the job market? As a proxy measure for programming language trends, let’s analyze the frequency of programming language mentions in the mont…
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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
How can we do better interviews in the age of AI
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Moving on from 18F
I had a wonderful job, until I didn’t. This is about what happened—and what is still happening.
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The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach
The description suggests that this is some kind of extended metaphor about work. It appears to be written in that _Choose Your Own Adventure_ style second-person voice, yet there are no choices to be found within. Against your better judgment, you follow the link.
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Programming with chronic pain
The challenges of programming with chronic pain and what worked for me
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My Time at MIT
Twenty years ago, in 2004-2005, I spent a year at MIT’s Computer Science department as a postdoc working with Professor Nancy Lynch. It was ...