The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
This document describes why and how a tech company can offer a career path to its engineering technical leaders, that is, different tracks for “deep ICs” versus “broad ICs”. To motivate this evolution, we identify two separate pressure points: from the business, to grow an increasingly skilled and mature technical …
Code review innocently asks a staggering question: “does this code look good to you?” It’s not even clear how to start to answer this question – which makes putting off code reviews easy.
Here are some things that I hated as a student. At the time, I thought my teachers didn’t understand or care how terrible they were.
The Worst Work Event Doesn't Have to Have the Worst Outcomes
As a Director of Engineering, I have monthly 1:1s with all of my direct reports. A 1:1 (one-on-one) is a recurring meeting with no set agenda between a manager and one of their reports. The internet is full of valuable insight into how to run them from my perspective, (ex. The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster) but…
Since a long time ago, companies hire agencies for help in design, accounting, social media management… you name it. While this was happening for a long time and is now considered the norm, t…
Why the landslide loss for San Francisco's school board is a victory for American meritocracy
Sam Julien is the Director of Product at CopilotKit, building open-source infrastructure for AI agents and generative UI. He writes about product strategy, developer experience, and the practical microskills that help you grow as a builder and leader.
Very few companies even consider this option, and that's a mistake
A reader recently sent me a video of a keynote speech, delivered in 2020 by the popular fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson. The title of the ... Read more
As software engineers, we're constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to execute. Isn't it weird that we rarely give a moment's thought to the program for our own careers?
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…
A walkthrough of my NSF CAREER proposal.
Life is short • There is no speed limit • How to Be Successful • You and your research • Becoming a Magician • 95th percentile isn’t that good
To write great policies, arm those in the future who will kill your darlings
I was chatting with a manager who was once a PO on a team I coached many years ago. This is only my best memory of the conversation (I didn'...
Pair programming is where two programmers work together on a single computer. One writes the code, while the other observes and offers suggestions. I'm not talking about debugging or brainstorming together, but this p...
I've been interested in games programming since I started learning programming as a teenager more than 25 years ago (gasp!) I started with Qbasic and Gorillas.bas, but never understood the code. Of course, I didn't get anywhere at the time, beyond very basic games. I wrote a simple Shoot
I joined Scale AI late last summer. It’s been a crazy experience — Scale is growing incredibly fast right now, hitting a valuation of over $7 billion last year and recently signing a $250 mil…
On looking for alternatives to Slack culture.
This is not a post on a technical topic, but rather on a common pitfall for engineers – we like to point out something wrong the moment we see it. Understandably, we are very good at it. We are basically trained for it. When it comes to code reviews, or design reviews for complicated distributed system protocols, we…
Musing on what makes effective company values.
Ask A Manager had a wild story a week ago. A company interviewed someone, hired him, but when he showed up for work … it was a totally different person. A friend asked, “if this was your hire, and you manager asked you to change your hiring practices to prevent this, what would you do?” Nothing. I would do nothing…
