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Hidden Costs That Engineers Ignore
“It’ll only take me a few hours to implement the feature,” we sometimes say. But after finishing, we find that every few weeks, we’re either fixing a bug with the feature, explaining it to another eng
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 190 posts.
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How to Learn Efficiently
I am convinced that much of the gap between the best college students and the worst is explained by study habits. Frankly, most students study poorly. To make matters worse, most teachers are incapable of teaching good study habits. Learning is proportional with effort Sitting in a classroom listening to a professor…
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Saving a Project and a Company
I often get the question what it is exactly that I do for a living and usually I can’t really talk about it due to non-disclosure agreements and possible fall-out but in this case I got permission to do a write-up of my most recent job.
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Software engineers should write
In elementary school, there were “math kids” and there were “English kids”. You were classified by the other kids’ impression of your prowess in each subject.
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Selling to the Fortune 500, Government, and Other Lovecraftian Horrors
You really can sell SaaS/software to large enterprises, despite your perceived inability to do so. Read on for how.
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Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy
When Travis CI turned into a business with employees, one of our ideas was to not constrain people in how much time they take off for vacations. We didn’t track the days people were taking off, and as the people running the company, we didn’t actively encourage people to take times off. In short, we had an open…
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Lazy Expert Syndrome
We all eventually suffer from "lazy expert syndrome." The best way to snap out of it and grow is to mentor someone new to your field.
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Ignoring pull requests discourages open-source contributions
What's the first thing you do when you find a bug or see a missing feature in an open source project? Check out the project page and submit a patch!
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Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
We learned recently of the suicide of Stefan Grimm, a successful professor at the prestigious Imperial College in London. Professors Grimm regularly published highly cited articles in the best journals. He was highly productive. Unfortunately, some of his colleagues felt that he did not secure sufficiently large…
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Resumes suck for hiring engineers
In this experiment, I wanted to see how good engineers and recruiters were at resume-based candidate filtering. Going into it, I was pretty sure that engineers would do a much better job than recruiters. However, that’s not what happened at all. As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the…
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The Magpie Developer
I’ve often thought that software developers were akin to Magpies, birds notorious for stealing shiny items to decorate their complex nests. Like Magpies, software developers are unusually smart and curious creatures, almost by definition. But we are too easily distracted by shiny new toys and playthings. I no longer
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How to Learn Hacking
The “ hacking ” we'll be talking about in this document is exploratory programming in an open-source environment. If you think “ hacking ” has anything to do with computer crime or security breaking and came here to learn that, you can go away now. There's nothing for you here.
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Say No
Saying yes is so much easier than saying no, but nobody else will ever value your time as much as you do so you need to be a responsible steward of it. Say No to meetings. Say No to interruptions. Say No to things that are urgent but not important. Prioritize your time based on impact, be transparent about those…
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You only get 1,000 lines of code a week
Choose to do only the things that nobody else can do.
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What women in technology really think (150 of them at least)
What women in technology really think (150 of them, at least)
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Board Members
Over the last five years, there has been an incredible shift in leverage from investors to founders. It’s good in most ways, but bad in an important few. Founders’ desire for control is good in...
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Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist
People often ask me if I’m a talent agent for engineers, in the same way that actors have talent agents in Hollywood. In a lot of ways, the way I work is closer to a talent agent than a traditional recruiter — rather than sourcing for specific positions, I try to find smart people first, […]