The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 311 posts.
I recently had a saga with a washing machine that reminded me why one of the most feared and hated tasks for software developers starts with the question: “So how long will it take you to build that?”
The challenges of programming with chronic pain and what worked for me
Twenty years ago, in 2004-2005, I spent a year at MIT’s Computer Science department as a postdoc working with Professor Nancy Lynch. It was ...
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs learn and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re…
Everybody hates working on legacy projects, me as well. Working on one, however, helped me get a deeper understanding of the dev process.
May 2026 update This post was written at a time of significant turmoil in my life, when multiple correlated events happened in quick succession. What I wrote in the post below is true, but a lot was left unsaid, as some things were still being investigated. At the time when I wrote the post, despite resigning from my…
FAA data shows 30 near-misses at Reagan Airport – NPR, Jan 30, 2025 The amount of attention an incident gets is proportional to the severity of the incident: the greater the impact to the organizat…
Software development topics I've changed my mind on over the course of a decade
What I use them for and what I don't
Frustrated with AWS's complexity and cost risks, I switched to NearlyFreeSpeech for its prepaid model, ensuring financial control while keeping hosting simple and flexible.
Amazing as it may seem after all these years, there are still junior developers in the world. A few weeks ago at work we had a talk where senior developers (including me) were invited to spend around five minutes each talking about our personal software development philosophies....
Over the years I've literally built hundreds of projects. Some with a lof of potential. Others just batshit crazy ideas. I started noticing a pattern. I'd...
While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We …
could you pass the FAA's Air Traffic Controller (ATC) biographical assessment?
What’s odd about you is what’s interesting.
I left to stay true to my byline
Why and how you should write "without bugs"
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
A while back I wrote : I've had many, many failures in my life. (Hm, maybe I should write a blog post about that.) This is that post. I'm ...
Certain tasks, and their complexity, change how impactful an interruption is. Research also discovers a disconnect between perception and physiological data.
Enterprise sales don't have to be crazy.
A rant about caring
A decade of firsthand advice on going from an employed software developer to successful indie hacker running your own business(es).
Rather than technology alone, it's the practices, processes, and culture changes DevOps introduces that can most positively impact your software delivery.
This is a transcript of my keynote presentation for the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo conference on January 8th, 2025. Watch the video here.
There's a bit more below, but I also wrote a follow-up 5 years after the illustrated guide which may be of interest -- HOWTO: Get tenure .
Stop Trying To Schedule A Call With Me - The harassment by SaaS
