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The gift of it's your problem now
Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hund...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 331 posts.
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The Ambiguity of Real Work
All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system.Dr. Richard I. Cook, How Complex Systems Fail There’s a wonderful book by the late urban planning professo…
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Takeaways from looking for a new senior role in tech
A few months ago, I left SeatGeek without much of a plan of what to do next. My green card was finally issued in 2021, which means that I didn’t have to scramble to find a new job in forty days. Fo...
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My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
One of the watershed moments of my life was as a 20 year old intern attending a workplace presentation about personal finance. Over the course of one hour, I learnt about the power of buy-and-hold …
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Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects
Programs are more complicated than projects which are more complicated than milestones. Instead of projects, focus on milestonesMost engineering organizations focus on delivering projects. You can get better results by focusing on milestones instead.
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Building Remote Teams for Startups
Most of the companies in the last year had to try out remote work in one way or the other. These are my highly notes on #remote #teams.
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Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?
With companies taking advantage of Free and Open Source Software far more often than they contribute back, and harming users in the process, is it even worth working on anymore?
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Step Away from Stack Overflow
Notes that I mostly write for myself, but you can read if you want.
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The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
When the term DevOps came up it was all about a simple idea:
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We need your beginner’s mind
We need your experiments and your questions and your feedback. Your lack of understanding is a valuable attribute that goes away as you gain experience.
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From Node to Ruby on Rails
I learned to code in the Javascript stack [1] and am building a Javascript based product [2]. I never questioned this stack: many companies default to it, JS everywhere seems good, and the community is big. But for my new side project I decided to try Rails because despite some...
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Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
New Post: ADTs in TLA+ Using Abstract Data Types in TLA+. It's an adaptation of part of my TLAConf talk. It's also a lot more advanced than most of the...
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How to handle difficult clients
If you've never had to wrangle a difficult client, this blog post is your opportunity to prepare. Disagreements happen, some people handle them better than others, how we conduct ourselves in these situations have a profound impact on the trajectory of our careers.
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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
Open Source software runs the Internet, and by extension the economy. This is an undisputed fact about reality in 2021. And yet, the role of Open Source maintainer has failed to mature from a hobby into a proper profession.
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Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
I fail phone screens pretty often, which limits my job prospects and is embarrassing for someone with ten years of industry experience, a pretty extensive Github account and a publicly available list of difference-making projects . 1 In theory a phone screen is supposed to evaluate whether a) this person would be good…
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Groups never admit failure
Groups never admit failure. A group would rather keep living in the mythology of “we were repressed” than ever admit failure. Individuals are the only ones who admit failure. Even individuals don’t like to admit failure, but eventually, they can be forced to. A group will never admit they were wrong. More
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Interview success can depend on how you schedule interviews
Interview scheduling is one of the lesser discussed topics when to comes to cracking an interview. This is often overlooked but there are nuances to scheduling interviews which can help you perform better during the interview and succeed. Over a period of time, I have realized that your ability to interview well…
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On Hubris and Humility
Last week I gave a talk at the Open Source Firmware Conference about some of the work I’m doing at Oxide Computer, entitled On Hubris and Humility. There is a video of the talk if you’d like to watch it in video form. It came out pretty alright!
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Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in
Engineers optimize for efficiency by working in parallel, creating waterfall regardless of Scrum. True agile means fixing stakeholder queues.
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Common Infrastructure Errors I've Made
One surreal experience as my career has progressed is the intense feeling of deja vu you get hit with during meetings. From time to time, someone will mention something and you'll flash back to the same meeting you had about this a few jobs ago. A decision was made
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100 years of whatever this will be
What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something? Last time, we explored why various bits of trendy technology are, in my o...