The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
HN Discussion Here: I always loved getting problems of the type “What is the limit as x approaches infinity” type in high-school/college. You’re given an equation (of the classic y=x format), and a…
The software industry loves young people, but old-timers serve an important purpose, too.
My favorite career advice
As an immigrant on an H1B, you have exactly 60 days to find a new job when you are laid-off. This is a very short window of time to explore and land any job, let alone a job that matches your skills and interests. I found myself in this situation along with many others when Uber announced layoffs earlier this year…
Strategic technology leader
A few years ago, Johannes Haushofer published a CV of failures. In it, he lists all the grants he wasn't awarded, positions he didn't get, papers rejected. I think that people need to be more open about failure. None of us are perfect - despite what our social media presence says - and all of us suffer rejection. But…
Notes that I mostly write for myself, but you can read if you want.
As I looked around and realized for the hundredth time that I was surrounded by people exactly like me, something inside me snapped. I downloaded the latest American Community Survey microdata, fired up R and started calculating feverishly.
After I completed my first programming class, I went straight to Craigslist. I advertised my programming services. I called myself an experienced programmer who could code anything. I posted a link to
Follow these steps to start an LLC in California
Helping people online is difficult. We expect technical questions and discussions, but everyone involved are just people, so it doesn’t always go smoothly.
After the sudden and miraculous shift to remote work – the office fightback has well and truly begun.
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders…
It tends to be standard recruitment practice in the tech industry to require candidates to complete some sort of coding test or challenge. Sometimes this takes the form of the much-feared whiteboard interview – where candidates are expected to work through a problem on the aforementioned whiteboard, in front of an…
Have you ever had a long-overdue task — a task which isn’t so bad in itself — but which you can’t even bring yourself to think about?
I wrote a piece this week about what motivates people to become managers (tldr mostly org dysfunction), and Julian Dunn replied with some typically insightful tweets:
Sometimes people choose to work for one company over another for reasons related to the work environment, for example what the company does, and whether the other employees create a place that's pleasant to work at. But a major factor is compensation. If Company A and Company B are largely comparable, but Company A…
I was incredibly lucky to spend 5 amazing years at Heroku. By the end of my time, I was operating in a Staff capacity, although I’m honestly completely uncle...
A guide to scaling product & engineering teams from $0 to past $100M ARR
Everything I learned to become a senior software engineer. From good skills to have, to dealing with difficult engineering problems.
The keys to debate effectively as a software developer and therefore bringing value to yourself and your company.
My heart was racing. My palms sweating. I was going to be fired.\nPerformance reviews had just ended, and it was time to meet my manager and be told my results. Except I knew what it would say. How else do you rate a programmer who doesn’t code?
One of the things I'm working on right now is a project that's aggregating data found in developers GitHub profiles. Since there are a couple of problems with using GitHub profiles as a data source like this, I wanted to first list out some of the issues I have with trying to assess developers by looking only at their…
This post has been edited to include (under Additional Thoughts) friends and acquaintances who have helped me immensely on my journey.
A series of conversations between Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Martin Fowler. We discuss Test-Driven Development (TDD) and its impact upon software design.
Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it— maple cocaine (@maplecocaine) January 3, 2019 Yesterday the main character of...
I quit my job in January 2020 to build...
Three years ago, things were different. I didn’t know any French, I didn’t have a business, and I didn’t have a job.
