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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 180 posts.
Why Most Software Engineers Lose Nothing by Unionizing
Should software engineers unionize? I can’t give a simple answer to this. There are advantages and disadvantages to enrolling in a collective bargaining arrangement. If the disadvantages didn…
Lessons in negotiation from Stalin at Yalta
Why did you sting me? You’ll drown too
MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
[See update at the bottom of the post.] I make and sell a security product called the SC4-HSM which, among other things, acts as a FIDO U...
Organizational Debt
We all know that classic aphorism: Year comes to an end, Rust blog post press send. This is mine. There are lots of cool technical improvements to Rust that I want the project to achieve this year, and a few in particular that I’m definitely going to be putting a lot of time into. But this blog post is going to talk…
The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)
technology as if people mattered
What Happens When a Founder Is Fully Vested?
Let’s say you are the founder and CEO of a startup and you have now been at it for four years. The company is doing great, you’ve raised several rounds of financing, you have a product in the market that is solving a real problem, you have a bunch of customers, you have a growing […]
Tech company patterns
First off, I'm not finished with this blog post. Don't take it too seriously. This is not about any one company . Some aren't even from me....
Developer on Call
For the system at work, I am on call one week every seven weeks. For most of the past ten years, I have been on organized on call rotations for the systems I have been developing. I think being on …
Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup
When I first joined a startup in 2012 I did my best to ask the right questions when interviewing. My engineering background prepared me for engineering tasks and helped me write a resume, but it didn’t prepare me well for how to evaluate a startup offer. While this might be obvious to some, this is what I wish I knew…
The Resistance Is Real – Why Side Projects Are So Hard
Today marks 15 full months that I’ve been working on a side project called Crafd. It’s a community for people who make things by hand: In that time I’ve: Talked to zero potential …
Why Aren't There C Conferences?
Most widely-used programming languages have at least one regular conference dedicated to discussing it. Heck, even Lisp has one . It’s a place to talk about the latest developments of the language, recent and upcoming standards, and so on. However, C is a notable exception. Despite its role as the foundation of the…
My hiring experience as a submarine sonar operator in the Norwegian Navy
As some of you know I spent a year on a submarine. This is the story about how that came about.
Django core no more
If you're not the sort of person who closely follows the internals of Django's development, you might not know there's …
I’m leaving Mozilla
It's been five great years, but now it is time for me to move on and try something else. During these five years I've met and interacted with a large number of awesome people at Mozilla, lots of new friends! I got the chance to work from home and yet work with a global team … Continue reading I’m leaving Mozilla →
Things nobody told me about being a software engineer
My dad started teaching me Basic when I was about 7 years old, and since about that age I knew that I wanted to build software for a living. It was obviously a fun and useful thing to do, and something that I could do well. But there is a big — and I mean Grand Canyon-scale BIG — difference between “programming” and…
How to Keep Your Job as Your Company Grows
I know a change is going to come If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing R…
Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success
Skill stacking is a strategy that you can use to achieve career success. You can use it whether you want to build a business or have a dream job.
The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
Lately I’ve been doing some career counseling for people off Twitter (long story).