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Think of Pavlov
almost all interactions are repeat games
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
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Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
I work as an Engineering Manager at Google, and my teams practice a simple habit - we book all meetings to start at five minutes past the hour (or half hour). This works better than trying to finish five minutes early. Meetings often don't finish on time, and the impact is highest with back-to-back meetings.…
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Why I left iNaturalist
After almost 18 years, I left iNaturalist, the product and organization I helped create. I left because I don’t believe the current Leadership team is pointing the product in the right direction, and I don’t think they are managing their talented staff in an empathetic or effective way. If you’d like me to continue…
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Lessons from 14 years at Google
Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code.
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KDE onboarding is good now
And my history with KDE
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Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams
Paper: This blog post has been expanded into a full paper: Scalable and Personalized Oral Assessments Using Voice AI (Panos Ipeirotis and...
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Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got
My CTO leaned back in our 1-on-1 and said something that sounded almost threatening: "You want to get promoted? Try to take my position."
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Love your customers
There were many reasons why I left Oracle shortly after it acquired Sun, but first among them: I could not stomach the disdain that Oracle had for its own customers. Sun — for all of its (many!) other faults — loved its customers.
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I canceled my book deal
I've always wanted to write a book, and I was close, but not this time.
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The future of software development is software developers
Psst. If your boss won’t invest in training you in Specification By Example (BDD, ATDD), I’m running out-of-hours workshops on May 12 and 16 specifically for self-funding learners. £99 + UK VAT. I&…
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Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what…
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My role as a founder-CTO: year 8
2025. What a year it has been. If a normal year as a startup founder already feels like four or five regular years, this one felt closer to a full decade. Th...
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If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
A client once responded to one of my questions by saying, "Oh Greg, I am too busy living to think about life!” His off-the-cuff comment named a trap al ...
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You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving
“Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘How’.” ― Viktor Frankl quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Man’s Search for Meaning Let me guess: Viktor Frankl calls this feeling the “existential vacuum” in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust, and in this…
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Three ways to solve problems
Deciding not to solve a problem, or solving a different one, can also be a viable solution.
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What makes you senior
The one skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t technical. It’s the ability to take ambiguous problems and make them concrete.Retry
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Believe the Checkbook
AI companies talk as if engineering is over. Their acquisitions say the opposite.
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The port I couldn't ship
Porting a venerable library on vibes. What started as a quick WebPerl success spiraled into weeks of failed attempts, mangled ASCII diagrams, and a hard lesson about respecting the craft embedded in battle-tested code.
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Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of …
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I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?
In June 2018, I joined mytaxi (FREE NOW), a competitor of Uber in the ride-hailing space, as Backend Chapter Lead. I was looking for an opportunity to grow in technical leadership. Honestly, I did not even fully understand what “Chapter Lead” meant. After some research, I learned it was part of Spotify’s squad (team)…
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Things I want to say to my boss
A new anonymous essay published every day in December in the countdown to Christmas.
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Internal RFCs saved us months of wasted work
And how to fix it with RFCs
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Getting into public speaking
Here are ten things I learnt about public speaking.
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So you want to speak at software conferences?
An article from dylanbeattie.net
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The highest quality codebase
Blog post
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Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners
Product Owner: Hey, how long do you believe Feature F will take? Developer: Idk. We haven’t even started working on it and it’s bound to stir up some old issues.
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Most technical problems are people problems
I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt - millions of lines of code, no unit tests, and products using l...
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Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
I spent a couple of years managing a team, and I entered that role – like many – without knowing anything about how to do it. I tried to figure out how to be a good manager, and doing so I ended up reading a lot about servant leadership . It never quite sat right with me, though. Servant leadership seems to me a lot…