2371
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
2372
2373
So Good They Can't Ignore You
Following your passion is the worst career advice you can get. Cal Newport argues for a more effective alternative.
2374
Bullshit Job Notes
Scott talks about a bit of medical theater, in which companies demand doctors notes to allow people to bring in their own chairs to work; he is often the person in best position to provide that not…
2375
The “Developer Experience” Bait-And-Switch
We cannot continue to use as much JavaScript as is now normal and expect the web to flourish. At the same time, most developers experience no constraint on their use of JS...until it's too late. Lightweight, effective tools are here, but we're stuck in a rhetorical rut. We need to reset our conversation about…
2376
2377
Breaking bad news
People often try to soften the blow of bad news. It doesn't work.
2378
2379
2380
Transmuting Low-Value Programmer Cred into High-Value Status Illegibility
Not long ago, I wrote a post about that one, “top” software engineer role that companies don’t hire directly into. I’m going to pick up where I left off there. For a quick recap, recall the diagram I made (and my wife kindly GIF-ified for me). In red, you have the positions that a company...
2381
2382
The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true?
There are a lot of idiots around — just look at the front benches of the House of Commons. But why do the idiots reach such elevated positions? Many onlookers feel sure that the successors to David…
2383
Companies shouldn't give candidates homework assignments
There’s a trend among start-ups (and some larger companies) that worries me: giving candidates “homework” assignments. Homework assignments lead to candidate abuse. Knock it off (or at least be reasonable). I’ve seen many friends and clients go through this. As a pre-screening round before an onsite
2384
Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)
[Another submission from a former postdoc at one of the top ten universities in the U.S. The e-mail came to me as follows: "I read your b...
2385
John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings
Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters. Most real-world programs run plenty fast enough on today's machines without any particular attention to…
2386
Reversing the effects of long programming sessions
Programming for long periods is like walking a high tight rope for a really, really long period of time, or at least I imagine it is... ...
2387
Software development requires servant leaders
The idea of “servant” leaders has been on the rise in the agile community of late. Robert K. Greenleaf coined the term in a 1970 essay, but the idea is timeless.
2388
Code review review is the manager’s job
Code review is such a high value, high leverage team activity that every manager should ensure the process is done well.
2389
Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken
All the broken parts of the Adult Entertainment Industry from the view point of a software developer
2390
2391
How I gained commit access to Homebrew in 30 minutes
This issue was publicly disclosed on the Homebrew blog at https://brew.sh/2018/08/05/security-incident-disclosure/
2392
2393
2394
Augmenting Agile with Formal Methods
I really like the c2 wiki as a historical artifact: a lot of big names in Agile and Extreme Programming argued with each other there.1 One thing they did was the Extreme Programming Challenge, where people tried to test the limits of these approaches. They’d find edge problems (designing databases, remote teams, etc)…
2395
2396
Administrative Purgatory
your case is still going through administrative processing and we don't know when that process will be completed. Last year I was denied to go to the US when I was about to travel to San Francisco. Me and my employer's legal team never got answers as to why this happened so I've personally tried … Continue reading…
2397
2398
2399
The Bulk of Software Engineering in 2018 Is Just Plumbing
I read a post online recently about how some software engineer was asked to complete a technically complex, jargon-filled coding challenge over the...
2400
Advice
Every now and again, someone emails me and asks for very general advice. ("How do I change the world?") With the caveat that I've only lived a fraction of one life, and am still trying to figure things out, here's the advice I'd give past me.