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My guiding principles after 20 years of programming (2020)
I’ve been programming since 1999. This year I’ve officially coded for 20+ years. I’ve started with Basic but soon jumped into Pascal and C…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 467 posts.
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How to Pay Professional Maintainers
To successfully fund Open Source projects, companies should: pay the maintainers; pay them real money; pay for maintenance; and keep paying them.
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No is a complete sentence
Has someone asked you to do something recently that you know you don’t have time to do but felt like you needed to do anyway? Or has someone tried to get you to help with something and impres…
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Should you work fixed hours, even if you have a flexible schedule?
The beauty of having a flexible schedule, when you are a freelancer, remote worker, or consultant, is being able to work whenever you like. When traveling, you can spend the whole day touring and working at night. Or maybe working in the morning and night, and enjoying the evenings. Whatever you want, it’s your call…
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Be good to your mentors
Mentor relationships can be absolutely wonderful over the arc of a career. This is a simple way to think about finding and keeping good mentors.
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On Being Indispensable
It took far too long for it to click in my brain that I was stuck. There was no career path. Sure my title changed, pay went up, but my day-to-day never changed. I was so busy collaborating with dozens of people across all departments, that it felt like I was growing. I wasn’t.
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How on earth I became an entrepreneur
The email landed in my inbox around 10:05/am, alerting us of an all-hands meeting in 15 minutes. “Guess we got acquired”, we all thought. 16 minutes later, we were all laid off. This was February of 2001. I was first alerted of my uselessness in 1995, when ~ fresh out of college ~ I worked ... Read more
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Levels of Technical Leadership
This document describes why and how a tech company can offer a career path to its engineering technical leaders, that is, different tracks for “deep ICs” versus “broad ICs”. To motivate this evolution, we identify two separate pressure points: from the business, to grow an increasingly skilled and mature technical …
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Code review decision fatigue
Code review innocently asks a staggering question: “does this code look good to you?” It’s not even clear how to start to answer this question – which makes putting off code reviews easy.
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Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
Here are some things that I hated as a student. At the time, I thought my teachers didn’t understand or care how terrible they were.
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The sunny side of firing someone
The Worst Work Event Doesn't Have to Have the Worst Outcomes
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The tech industry controls CS conference funding. What are the dangers?
Research about the influence of computing technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), on society relies heavily upon the financial support of the very companies that produce those technologies. Corporations like Google, Microsoft, and IBM spend millions of dollars each year to sponsor labs, professorships, PhD…
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One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions
Learn why top-down standardization efforts can often lead to failure and how understanding specific problems through collaboration and embedding wi...
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How to get the most out of your 1:1s
As a Director of Engineering, I have monthly 1:1s with all of my direct reports. A 1:1 (one-on-one) is a recurring meeting with no set agenda between a manager and one of their reports. The internet is full of valuable insight into how to run them from my perspective, (ex. The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster) but…
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Pair Programming Antipatterns
What you shouldn't do when pair programming.
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The “agencies of one” storm is coming
Since a long time ago, companies hire agencies for help in design, accounting, social media management… you name it. While this was happening for a long time and is now considered the norm, t…
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The war on gifted education
Why the landslide loss for San Francisco's school board is a victory for American meritocracy
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The painfully shy developer's guide to networking for a better job (2017)
Sam Julien is the Director of Product at CopilotKit, building open-source infrastructure for AI agents and generative UI. He writes about product strategy, developer experience, and the practical microskills that help you grow as a builder and leader.
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Why not hire part-time developers?
Very few companies even consider this option, and that's a mistake
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The road to success is paved with rejection letters
Let's get this out of the way up front. I'm a successful academic. I have one of the best jobs in academia (Max Planck director). I've been able to do work that I care about, with great colleagues and students, and it's been recognized by my community. I'm white, male, and straight. I was raised by educated, caring…
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Brandon Sanderson’s advice for doing hard things
A reader recently sent me a video of a keynote speech, delivered in 2020 by the popular fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson. The title of the ... Read more
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A career ending mistake
As software engineers, we're constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to execute. Isn't it weird that we rarely give a moment's thought to the program for our own careers?
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