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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
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Why is selling software so weird?
Building software looks a lot like building a house, but selling the two couldn't be more different.
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Job hunting while day-jobbing (2021)
Interviewing is stressful enough, but interviewing while doing your day job?1 Yikes! Well, I just did it,2 and I’m here to tell you that it’s totally …
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Is my advice too mercenary?
A criticism of some of my writing is that it’s too mercenary. Some see my advice as coldly calculating, too focused on individual outcomes over collective ones, and implicitly distrustful of others. I think this is fair criticism! It’s not exactly what I’m going for, but it’s a fair reading. However, there’s more to…
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How did I get so unhappy working in tech?
Click to read Mr. Chan's guide to substitute teaching, a Substack publication.
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Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on
I think it was due to overwhelming boredom with the RFP process that I once partnered with my sales leader to say Yes to every single requirement on every RFP bid during the summer of 2020. We called it The Summer of Yes.
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Exit interviews are a trap
It’s tempting to air your grievances at your exit interview. Don’t. There’s almost no upside to speaking up, and tremendous potential downside. Avoid exit interviews if you can. If you must go, be totally bland; say nothing negative.
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Why I'm in the Army Reserve – an explainer for my friends in tech
Outside my day job doing compiler research at Shopify, I lead the Cheshire Yeomanry , a squadron of British Army Reserve light cavalry . I spend about a hundred days a year of my spare-time in evenings, weekends, and holidays, training my Squadron.
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The tech interview prep industry
Before I got into tech, I worked at a tutoring company in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., doing a mix of schoolwork-related tutoring and standardized test prep. From a business perspective, it made so much sense - you have kids taking standardized tests and parents who wanted their kids to do well…
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Strategy and criteria decision matrix: A framework for decision making
I attended a talk by Evan Moore a while ago, where he described a framework the early team at Doordash used to make decisions and prioritize growth strategies. I was impressed by the systematic way of listing strategies and assigning them weights based on possible impact + predicted effort it would take to execute…
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My macOS keyboard shortcuts
*Not literally all, but certainly those which I find most useful, and which also might not be all that widely known.
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Hard to work with
Managing teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout, and I had no energy left to absorb the typical sorts of organizational changes that happen at any company. Despite doing good work, I handled…
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How to work with me
A user guide for David Bauer. About this document If you start working with a new person, wouldn’t it be nice if you had some sort of user guide that gives you a basic understanding of how to work with them? This document is exactly that. It captures my guiding principles, how I work as […]
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Maybe you should do less 'work'
Working in tech, I've observed developers who work as hard as possible when they don't need to. I’m here today to tell you that it's a bad idea and you shouldn't do it.
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Mourning loss as a remote team
This is a hard one to write about. Last year our team lost Pete, a long time engineer. Pete took his own life. He had battled mental health issues for some time.
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The Guide to Onboarding Software Engineers
Learn how to onboard engineers with an empathetic and structured approach. Includes a 30-60-90-day check-in template.
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Java Development on an Apple M1 – A One Year Review
Collection of pitfalls, tips & tricks, and workarounds for Java development on an Apple M1 processor (ARM64): Testcontainers, Docker, Testing
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I have quit my job
Several years ago, I decided to quit freelancing and do a day job. The job would pay much less but I was struggling with mental health (ADHD). On my therapist's suggestion, I decided to give the job thing a try. It worked wonderfully, my struggles with discipline are a thing of past. Or so I believe.
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I won an award from the FSF for my contributions to Emacs
In this video I thank the Free Software Foundation for the award and stress the importance of the community.
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My guiding principles after 20 years of programming (2020)
I’ve been programming since 1999. This year I’ve officially coded for 20+ years. I’ve started with Basic but soon jumped into Pascal and C…
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How to Pay Professional Maintainers
To successfully fund Open Source projects, companies should: pay the maintainers; pay them real money; pay for maintenance; and keep paying them.
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No is a complete sentence
Has someone asked you to do something recently that you know you don’t have time to do but felt like you needed to do anyway? Or has someone tried to get you to help with something and impres…
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Should you work fixed hours, even if you have a flexible schedule?
The beauty of having a flexible schedule, when you are a freelancer, remote worker, or consultant, is being able to work whenever you like. When traveling, you can spend the whole day touring and working at night. Or maybe working in the morning and night, and enjoying the evenings. Whatever you want, it’s your call…
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Be good to your mentors
Mentor relationships can be absolutely wonderful over the arc of a career. This is a simple way to think about finding and keeping good mentors.
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On Being Indispensable
It took far too long for it to click in my brain that I was stuck. There was no career path. Sure my title changed, pay went up, but my day-to-day never changed. I was so busy collaborating with dozens of people across all departments, that it felt like I was growing. I wasn’t.
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How on earth I became an entrepreneur
The email landed in my inbox around 10:05/am, alerting us of an all-hands meeting in 15 minutes. “Guess we got acquired”, we all thought. 16 minutes later, we were all laid off. This was February of 2001. I was first alerted of my uselessness in 1995, when ~ fresh out of college ~ I worked ... Read more