The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 467 posts.
A step by step guide for solving a difficult organizational problem, including notes on single stack ranks, team interdependencies, building consensus, reducing work in progress, and how to move your company towards better priority management.
Just a bit over half a year ago, I started my PhD in Quantum Computing. Even though I basically didn’t have any previous knowledge about it, I thought Quantum Computing was an interesting challenge to get into. What should I say? Quantum Computing is really cool, indeed! Having a background in Theoretical Informatics…
From spring 2021 through spring 2022, I was a Unit-18 Lecturer for UC Berkeley in the EECS department. A Unit-18 lecturer is what is often c...
How and why to use the second most powerful question known to software development
The Dangerous Professional finds the seams between the policies, and slips inside them to Get Stuff Done
Lessons learned from 10 years at Google
To help meet growing demand, Apple today launched updated professional training and certifications for IT support and management.
OKRs are one of those business ideas that are just simple enough to be dangerous. You think you understand it in a day, and you can see where your company is falling short: lacking focus and underdelivering. You see how clear, measurable goals could improve the situation. Here’s the one sentence version: You set…
On fighting the feeling of "blah".
Developers are systems thinkers and yet, most measures of developer productivity are metrics-based, instead of systems-based. In this post, Sourcegraph co-founder and CTO Beyang Liu presents five charts that visualize what really matters for developer productivity.
Last month, April 2022, marked the 10 year anniversary of my start as a professional programmer.
The problems I will discuss in this article are not unique to the software industry. In fact, this is expected in many large companies…
It’s been a rough month for Heroku. On April 15th, they opened a security notice that’s been active ever since – the status page, designed for incidents measured in hours rather than days or weeks, dutifully reads off a duration of “478 hours, 9 minutes” 1 .
In this article, the author explores the differences between line and staff software engineers. They discuss the advantages and disadvantages of ea...
Understanding how companies go about figuring out compensation. And an exercise to do for your team.
This is a story of how it took me way too long to ship a product, and I ended up paying for a competitor product instead.
It feels a lot of developers online either went to a prestigious computer science program in university or are self-taught. However, not many talk about community college in those communities. It’s very much a different experience, and I was in… Continue reading →
It sounds surreal to even say it out loud, but I’ve been living in America for the majority of my life, ever since I was a teenager. And for 18 of those years, I was legally a transient – hop…
Software engineer and writer focused on developer tools, cloud infrastructure, and the intersection of technology and human behavior.
Engineers often have to ask each other for “estimates”– rough projections for how long projects will take. While some teams do rigorous estimation rituals to varying degrees of success, many situation
Hello, everyone. I’m going to be taking an extended break from kottke.org, starting today. I’ve been writing here for more than 24 years, nearly half my life —
The pandemic made evident how much work can, and should, be different. The forced change to accommodate remote workflows also brought to light what I like to call “virtual offices”. Unlike truly remote friendly workplaces optimized for asynchronous communication, these aim to merely transport the office into a virtual…
We were magicians and the web was our magic
A recap of the recent interview process with several companies, what I learned, and what others should know.
