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Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer
I sat next to a senior software engineer for a year. Here’s what I learnt.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
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Rabbit Holes: The Secret to Technical Expertise
(Alternate Title: How to Shut Up the Ubuntu MOTD, the Long Way) Sometimes, the simplest questions take you on exciting journies. This was, in...
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Software Architecture Guide
Software Architecture is the important aspects of a software system's internal design, usually its major components and aspects that are hard to change.
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On me, and the Media Lab
(Please be sure to read the addendum at the end of this post.) A week ago last Friday, I spoke to Joi Ito about the release of documents that accuse Media Lab co-founder Marvin Minsky of involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s horrific crimes.* Joi told me that evening that the Media Lab’s ties to Epstein went… Read More »On…
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‘Product engineers’ vs ‘Software engineers’ in startups
You should be multi-faceted, never work purely to your technical abilities, think about how you can make your entire company better
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Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team
Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team and the community of Android developers and users
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How Slack Harms Projects
Presently, real-time communication tools such as Slack are very popular in business environments. However, use of these tools creates a culture that harms projects. It negatively impacts planning a...
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How to Pay Programmers Less (2016)
Programmers are expensive and difficult to control; here are a few tricks to keep them underpaid and happy, for a while.
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GitHub stars won’t pay your rent
Lessons learned and mistakes made while turning an open-source project into a profitable SaaS product.
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Documentation – Your Secret Weapon
When you work on a software project, someone will eventually ask a variation of this dreaded question - "Do you know where I can find documentation for this feature?" or "Do you know why we implemented pattern x over pattern y?" or my personal favourite "What the heck does this piece of code even do?".
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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
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How to Accomplish Big Things, Even When You Feel Small
“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.” — Shel Silverstein Have you ever felt like your dreams are bigger than you are? Like wanting to travel to exotic…
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One week of empathy training
I've spent a week cosplaying as a disabled user. And I hate it. A couple of months ago, I attended a private talk given by a disabled colleague of mine. "Everyone should believe disabled people's stories about accessibility problems," she said. "But, given that people don't, here's what I want you to do. Spend one…
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Some things that might help you make better software (2016)
Assuming you're in the unusual position of actually having budget for quality, here's what to spend it on.
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Burnout
I have burned out twice – once at 26, once at 30. Each time it took months to come back and feel like myself again. Burnout affects everyone differently; it’s only in hindsight that I’ve been able to understand how it affected me, and learned to recognize the signs.
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Skills Poor Programmers Lack
A friend and I had a discussion about the basic skills that are often lacking in experienced programmers. How can a programmer work for ten or twenty years and never learn to write good code? Too often they need close supervision to ensure they go down the right path, and can never be trusted to take technical…
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What I Know About Being Sick at Work (2018)
Some of the strategies I use for managing my disability in the workplace.