The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 467 posts.
It’s been a while since I was on the receiving end of a software engineering interview. But I still remember my favorite interview question. It was at MemSQL circa 2013. (They haven’t even kept their name, so I assume they’re not still relying on this specific interview question. I don’t feel bad for revealing it…
When hiring developers, there are many things we are looking for, but over the years I have found that raw coding ability is easily the most important quality to look for. I can quickly…
Building software looks a lot like building a house, but selling the two couldn't be more different.
Interviewing is stressful enough, but interviewing while doing your day job?1 Yikes! Well, I just did it,2 and I’m here to tell you that it’s totally …
A criticism of some of my writing is that it’s too mercenary. Some see my advice as coldly calculating, too focused on individual outcomes over collective ones, and implicitly distrustful of others. I think this is fair criticism! It’s not exactly what I’m going for, but it’s a fair reading. However, there’s more to…
Click to read Mr. Chan's guide to substitute teaching, a Substack publication.
I think it was due to overwhelming boredom with the RFP process that I once partnered with my sales leader to say Yes to every single requirement on every RFP bid during the summer of 2020. We called it The Summer of Yes.
Airbnb brands itself as creating community and fostering belonging. Today, former Airbnb software engineer Sahil describes how “Airfam” ignores internal inequi…
It’s tempting to air your grievances at your exit interview. Don’t. There’s almost no upside to speaking up, and tremendous potential downside. Avoid exit interviews if you can. If you must go, be totally bland; say nothing negative.
Outside my day job doing compiler research at Shopify, I lead the Cheshire Yeomanry , a squadron of British Army Reserve light cavalry . I spend about a hundred days a year of my spare-time in evenings, weekends, and holidays, training my Squadron.
Before I got into tech, I worked at a tutoring company in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., doing a mix of schoolwork-related tutoring and standardized test prep. From a business perspective, it made so much sense - you have kids taking standardized tests and parents who wanted their kids to do well…
I attended a talk by Evan Moore a while ago, where he described a framework the early team at Doordash used to make decisions and prioritize growth strategies. I was impressed by the systematic way of listing strategies and assigning them weights based on possible impact + predicted effort it would take to execute…
*Not literally all, but certainly those which I find most useful, and which also might not be all that widely known.
We’ve hosted over 100K technical interviews at interviewing.io. Here are the companies whose engineers are really good at technical interviews.
Managing teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout, and I had no energy left to absorb the typical sorts of organizational changes that happen at any company. Despite doing good work, I handled…
I am often asked what I mean when I say that developers spend most of their time figuring the system out. Let’s unpack the statement.
A user guide for David Bauer. About this document If you start working with a new person, wouldn’t it be nice if you had some sort of user guide that gives you a basic understanding of how to work with them? This document is exactly that. It captures my guiding principles, how I work as […]
Archived MIT Admissions blog post 'We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles,' published March 28, 2022. Preserved for historical context; not maintained as current admissions policy.
Working in tech, I've observed developers who work as hard as possible when they don't need to. I’m here today to tell you that it's a bad idea and you shouldn't do it.
This is a hard one to write about. Last year our team lost Pete, a long time engineer. Pete took his own life. He had battled mental health issues for some time.
Learn how to onboard engineers with an empathetic and structured approach. Includes a 30-60-90-day check-in template.
Collection of pitfalls, tips & tricks, and workarounds for Java development on an Apple M1 processor (ARM64): Testcontainers, Docker, Testing
Several years ago, I decided to quit freelancing and do a day job. The job would pay much less but I was struggling with mental health (ADHD). On my therapist's suggestion, I decided to give the job thing a try. It worked wonderfully, my struggles with discipline are a thing of past. Or so I believe.
In this video I thank the Free Software Foundation for the award and stress the importance of the community.
