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Should managers still code?
Ah, the eternal question, straight from the mailbag.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
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2025 Hiring Pause
Together with all of American higher education, Cornell is entering a time of significant financial uncertainty. The potential for deep cuts in federal research funding, as well as tax legislation affecting our endowment income, has now been added to existing concerns related to rapid growth and cost escalations. It…
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Write to Escape Your Default Setting
Writing serves as a foundation for clarity in thought. It can help you engage more deeply with your ideas.
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API design note: Beware of adding an "Other" enum value
What are you going to do when you add a new kind?
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Resident physicians' exam scores tied to patient survival
New analysis finds tests for new doctors can measure what matters — the life and health of patients
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Freelancing: How I found clients, part 1
tools, tactics, troubles along the way
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The benefits of learning in public
Learning in public helps me grow as an engineer and seems to benefit others too. Here's why I should do more.
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Ask for no, don't ask for yes (2022)
I think it is important to have a bias for action. Like anything else, this is something you can make a habit of. Moving forward allows you to make progress. I don’t know about you, but I’ve frozen up in the past not knowing what the right path was for me. Moving forward, even the smallest possible step, helped break…
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Fast Cash vs. Slow Equity
Knowing what you're building
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20 years working on the same software product
I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has c…
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Users don't care about your tech stack
They care about the product and their needs.
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Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?
There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five years ago. Compared to other industries, job listings for software engineers grew much more in 2021-2022, but have declined much faster since. A look into possible reasons for this, and what could come next.
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Rust, C++, and Python trends in jobs on Hacker News (February 2025)
How are Rust, C++, and Python trending on Hacker News in the job market? As a proxy measure for programming language trends, let’s analyze the frequency of programming language mentions in the mont…
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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
How can we do better interviews in the age of AI
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Moving on from 18F
I had a wonderful job, until I didn’t. This is about what happened—and what is still happening.
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The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach
The description suggests that this is some kind of extended metaphor about work. It appears to be written in that _Choose Your Own Adventure_ style second-person voice, yet there are no choices to be found within. Against your better judgment, you follow the link.
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My washing machine refreshed my thinking on software estimation
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?”
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Programming with chronic pain
The challenges of programming with chronic pain and what worked for me
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My Time at MIT
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 ...
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New junior developers can’t code
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…
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You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
Everybody hates working on legacy projects, me as well. Working on one, however, helped me get a deeper understanding of the dev process.
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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
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…
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You're missing your near misses
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…
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Software development topics I've changed my mind on
Software development topics I've changed my mind on over the course of a decade
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How I use LLMs as a staff engineer
What I use them for and what I don't
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Escaping surprise bills and over-engineered messes: Why I left AWS
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.