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Nobody is coming to save your career
I waited years for someone to invest in my career. Nobody came.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
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Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies
I’ve taken agency in the treatment of my bone cancer (osteosarcoma in the T5 vertebrae of the upper spine). After I ran out of standard-of-care treatment options and there were no trials available for…
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Should QA exist?
There are a lot of challenges in the way QA and engineering work together. Many eng leaders think you shouldn't have QA. I dig in.
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Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft
I started a reading group in 2021, a few months after joining Microsoft as a new grad on the Azure Databases team. The group was initially focused on database internals, which was my favorite subject at UW. Databases touch so many areas of CS: compiler construction in the query engine, memory management with the…
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You are not your job
On automation, identity, and why warmth and presence — not technical skill — are the parts of a person that can never be replaced by a model.
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Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts
I called a large company the other day. Did I know the information I wanted could be found on their website? And was I aware that I could manage my account online? And would I like to receive a link to chat with their AI assistant via WhatsApp? Naturally, call volumes were higher than expected. I can only assume that…
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Some things just take time
On friction, patience, and planting trees.
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AI coding is gambling
GambleAI I’ve been coding a lot with AI since November, when we all noticed it got really good. And it is quite good for instantly generating something th...
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If you thought code writing speed was your problem you have bigger problems
AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it. Writing code was already fast. The bottleneck is everything else: unclear requirements, review queues, terrified deploy…
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Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members. Or the cost of commun...
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I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me
[2026-03-16 Mon 03:09] Since this might be prone to misinterpretation as an excuse to treat people rudely, a clarification is warranted. Being direct is not rude, and this style of communication assumes an established …
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An opinionated take on how to do important research that matters
An opinionated perspective on how to do important research that makes a difference (and sometimes win awards).
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Willingness to look stupid
Looking foolish is underrated.
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I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
In 2021, being a good software engineer felt great. The world was full of software, with more companies arriving every year who needed to employ engineers to…
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We might all be AI engineers now
The models are good now. But most people still miss the point.
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Let's Get Physical
This week has been… eventful. And when I say eventful, I can say this has been the funniest pentest I have ever been on in my life. Let me tell you about it!
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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
We reward complexity and ignore simplicity. In interviews, design reviews, and promotions. Here’s how to fix it.
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My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
I shared this internally at Meta in response to a deluge of clout-chasing posts celebrating PMs landing prod diffs. The response was positive and the message generalizes, so here we are on the open www. PMs shouldn’t waste time landing … Continue reading →
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Don't become an engineering manager
Should you become an engineering manager?
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AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
Writing code is easier than ever. Being a software engineer is harder than ever. The paradox nobody talks about, and what engineers and leaders should do.
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Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension
A systems analysis of how AI-assisted development creates a gap between output speed and understanding, and why organizations cannot see it happening.
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Leaving Google has actively improved my life
In May of 2023, Google introduced “AI overviews” into their search engine.^1] This followed years of decisions leading to worse search quality and the consum...
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Poor Deming never stood a chance
This post is an elaboration of a shorter post I wrote about five years ago. The two management giants of the mid-twentieth century were Peter Drucker and W. Edwards Deming. Ironically, while Drucke…
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I’m joining OpenAI
I'm joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent.
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A Programmer's Loss of Identity
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me . In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be…
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The consequences of task switching in supervisory programming
the future of senior developers, junior developers, more on cognitive debt, DevEx versus AgentEx, the role of IDEs, consequences of task switching in supervisory programming