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How to communicate effectively as a developer
Some tactical and strategic tips for writing effectively as a software developer.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
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Addiction to ideas (2017)
This was me about 10 years ago: Hi, I’m Colleen. I’m an entrepreneurship professor. I listen to ideas all day long and I can’t get enough of them. I dream about my students ideas …
1113
What “work” looks like
Collaboration is amazing! There’s absolutely no trade-offs, right? The mantra of sharing your work and involving everyone in decisions naturally leads to…
1114
Salary Transparency
Xe Iaso's personal website.
1115
When is short tenure a red flag?
A pattern of short tenure – multiple short jobs over a small period of time – can be a red flag, but necessarily. I’ll dig into short tenure in this article. What’s “short”? What’s a “pattern”? When you’re thinking of switching jobs, when and how should your tenure factor into the decision? For hiring managers, when…
1116
Engineers should do customer support and success
The best PLG founders, startups, strategies, metrics and community. Every week.
1117
Wait vs. Interrupt Culture
At this past weekend's CFAR Workshop (about which, by the way, I plan to have another post soon with less whining and more serious discussion), someone mentioned that they were uncomfortable with pauses in conversation, and that got me thinking about different conversational styles.
1118
Focus is saying no to good ideas
Several stories about one of the hardest maxims to put to practice in business.
1119
Abuse prevention is tradecraft
It’s sunday evening; there’s a lot to be said for being a stay-at-home-dad, and honestly I actually like having stuff like meal-prep and laundry to do, after 35+ years of “All Uni…
1120
Being on a board as an employee
I recently left my job at Honeycomb. They’re a fantastic company, and I think they will be wildly successful. Still, life circumstances are such that I wanted to explore an opportunity at a much larger technology organization. More on that in another post, perhaps. In this post, I want to reflect on a unique aspect of…
1121
How to build software like an SRE
I’ve been doing this “reliability” stuff for a little while now (~5 years), at companies ranging from about 20 developers to over 2,000. I’ve always cared primarily about the software elements I describe as living “outside” the application – like, how does it get its configuration? What kinds of instances does it run…
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Product vs. Engineering
Friction Between Product and Engineering; Lack of trust and collaboration slowing down product growth
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Trying new programming languages helped me grow as a software engineer
Use new programming languages knowledge to level up your Software Engineer career!
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How boring should your team's codebases be
Thoughts on how to keep the novelty in a team at the correct level for easy onboarding
1127
Lessons learned since posting my salary history publicly
What I've learned in the year since posting my salary history publicly.
1128
Know Your Carrying Capacity
Mac's Tech Blog
1129
Take a break
I need to hit the emergency break.
1130
Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance
This is a wild and hopeful story: grad students at Northeastern successfully pushed back against invasive digital surveillance in their workplace, through solidarity, fearlessness, and the bright light of publicity. It's a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the "shitty technology adoption curve."
1131
For Best Results, Forget the Bonus
NEW YORK TIMES October 17, 1993 For Best Results, Forget the Bonus By Alfie Kohn “Do this and you’ll get that.” These six words sum up the most popular way in which American business strives…
1132
Expectations of professional software engineers
In a 2019 talk/rant titled “Everyone Watching This Is Fired”, games industry veteran Mike Acton rattled off a sample of 50 things he expects of developers he works with. The title refers to his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that anyone who doesn’t meet all these requirements would be immediately fired.
1133
How to distort Scrum until it no longer works
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
1134
Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff Engineers. These career ladders attempt to identify the commonalities across many folks performing similar roles in their organization, but in the end these ladders are a tool that apply better against populations than people. In the case of…
1135
I don’t believe in sprints
Sorry, I have opinions again.
1136
How I learned about corporate firewalls
This is story about how I learned to be a little bit less naive about the web and how it works. But it's also a story of user experience and what we owe our users in terms of error handling - even when the problem isn't our fault.
1137
Leonardo Syndrome
Ever heard of Leonardo Syndrome? If you’ve read Peter Burke’s excellent book, The Polymath,[^1] then you will have done, but if not: Leonardo Syndrome is...
1138
From Burned Out Tech CEO to Amazon Warehouse Associate
After a 23-year career at Microsoft, Facebook, and a Gates Foundation nonprofit, Philip Su burned out and found unexpected recovery working as an Amazon warehouse associate.
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First make the change easy, then make the easy change (2021)
When I find myself stuck between differing choices I have to make, I’ll refer to this quote. I’ll ask myself “why is the decision difficult to make?”