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Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?
With companies taking advantage of Free and Open Source Software far more often than they contribute back, and harming users in the process, is it even worth working on anymore?
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
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Step Away from Stack Overflow
Notes that I mostly write for myself, but you can read if you want.
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The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
When the term DevOps came up it was all about a simple idea:
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We need your beginner’s mind
We need your experiments and your questions and your feedback. Your lack of understanding is a valuable attribute that goes away as you gain experience.
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From Node to Ruby on Rails
I learned to code in the Javascript stack [1] and am building a Javascript based product [2]. I never questioned this stack: many companies default to it, JS everywhere seems good, and the community is big. But for my new side project I decided to try Rails because despite some...
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Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
New Post: ADTs in TLA+ Using Abstract Data Types in TLA+. It's an adaptation of part of my TLAConf talk. It's also a lot more advanced than most of the...
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How to handle difficult clients
If you've never had to wrangle a difficult client, this blog post is your opportunity to prepare. Disagreements happen, some people handle them better than others, how we conduct ourselves in these situations have a profound impact on the trajectory of our careers.
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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
Open Source software runs the Internet, and by extension the economy. This is an undisputed fact about reality in 2021. And yet, the role of Open Source maintainer has failed to mature from a hobby into a proper profession.
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Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
I fail phone screens pretty often, which limits my job prospects and is embarrassing for someone with ten years of industry experience, a pretty extensive Github account and a publicly available list of difference-making projects . 1 In theory a phone screen is supposed to evaluate whether a) this person would be good…
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Groups never admit failure
Groups never admit failure. A group would rather keep living in the mythology of “we were repressed” than ever admit failure. Individuals are the only ones who admit failure. Even individuals don’t like to admit failure, but eventually, they can be forced to. A group will never admit they were wrong. More
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Interview success can depend on how you schedule interviews
Interview scheduling is one of the lesser discussed topics when to comes to cracking an interview. This is often overlooked but there are nuances to scheduling interviews which can help you perform better during the interview and succeed. Over a period of time, I have realized that your ability to interview well…
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On Hubris and Humility
Last week I gave a talk at the Open Source Firmware Conference about some of the work I’m doing at Oxide Computer, entitled On Hubris and Humility. There is a video of the talk if you’d like to watch it in video form. It came out pretty alright!
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Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in
Engineers optimize for efficiency by working in parallel, creating waterfall regardless of Scrum. True agile means fixing stakeholder queues.
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Common Infrastructure Errors I've Made
One surreal experience as my career has progressed is the intense feeling of deja vu you get hit with during meetings. From time to time, someone will mention something and you'll flash back to the same meeting you had about this a few jobs ago. A decision was made
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100 years of whatever this will be
What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something? Last time, we explored why various bits of trendy technology are, in my o...
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My worst tech interview experience
Everyone in tech seems to have a “terrible tech interview” story. The topic quietly orbits in the ether of our industry and periodically bursts through the a...
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Twitter has a new CEO – what about a new business model?
Twitter is changing CEOs once again; what if the company changed its business model from ads to subscriptions?
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Books that changed my career as a software engineer
I'd like to present five books that have changed my mind about software development showing me lots of concepts, techniques and tips. Let's see them and why I they were so valuable to me
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Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs
Edit, 11/20/2023: If you like this post, it inspired a book co-written by me and Liz Zalman. You can find it here. One of my portfolio companies raised a round a few months ago and I left their boa…
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Writing is networking for introverts
Networking is painful, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to enjoy it. Unfortunately for me, networking is effective.
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Don't soften feedback
When I talk about balancing being directive and empowering as a leader, the distinction between being kind and being nice often comes up.
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Things you are allowed to do, academic edition
Since it’s application season again, I thought that I would share some things that you are ‘allowed’ to do in academia but may not be aware of. This post is inspired by Milan Cvitkovic’s post on ‘Things you’re allowed to do’ and Veronika Cheplygina’s posts on advice for Ph.D. students, in particular her post ‘7 things…
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10 years of whatever this has been
I guess I know something about train wrecks. One night when I was 10 years old, me and my mom were driving home. We came to a train crossin...