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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 351 posts.
How I Became a Programmer in ~12 Weeks
I posted a very brief response to a post on HackerNews yesterday challenging the notion that 8 weeks of guided tutelage on Ruby on Rails is not going to produce someone who you might consider a "junior RoR developer." It did not garner many upvotes so I figured that like most conversation on the Internet it faded into…
How Elite Firms Hire: The Inside Story
I highly recommend Lauren Rivera’s “Ivies, Extracurriculars, and Exclusion” (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 2011). Not only is the piece careful, edifying, and interesting; it’s even emotionally affecting. Learning more about elite hiring actually replaced my apathy toward elite firms with sour grapes…
Why Software Projects Are Terrible And How Not To Fix Them
If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process. The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas. Some of these ideas h…
Don't. Waste. Time.
Office space Launch parties Health insurance plans Salary negotiations Founder equity splits Series F stock Office Food Team-building activities CRM systems Bookkeeping Head count Working in SOMA Convertible debt caps Valuations TechCrunch Karma scores ISOs Powerpoint Business Cards Banks Lawyers Desks 1099s Bug…
John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
( 33:45-35:53 from John Gruber's keynote speech at The Çingleton Symposium, a conference which took place in Montréal on October 14th and 1...
How I Made $19,000 on the App Store While Learning to Code
The past year and a half has been quite a journey. I’ve gone from starting to learn iPhone design, to quitting my full time job and focusing on an application full-time. All while teaching myself to program in Objective-C with no prior programming experience. OneVoice is a iPhone/iPad application that gives a voice to…
The plumber programmer
I called someone a plumber programmer the other day. The person I was speaking to didn't realize that "plumber programmer" is a term of great respect. The plumber is often the most experienced programmer on a team. As with literal plumbing, software plumbing connects things together. It deals with things other people…
My ICT teacher can’t mark my homework
Three years ago in August 2009 we ran the first ever Young Rewired State – a hack weekend aimed at the young developer community. I was determined to try to engage them with the exciting (sic…
How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords
How cold calling succeeded where AdWords failed, producing a 100% conversion rate and all the information needed to create a scalable business.
Portrait of a N00b
Well, the typing issue is a thorny one. I think as a general rule, the reddit types are too eager to denounce it immediately and tell us all that Ruby is the answer, or whatever it is this week, and the Java purists and academics make the opposite argument. Coming from someone from a dynamic background, I didn't use a…
Don't Give Your Users Shit Work
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Be nice. It's a fscking gift
Free, preconfigured Linux server images for self-hosting
Do Not Start A Startup: Or, What I Learned At Startup School 2011
Home page for Andy Brett
Experts often end up where they started as beginners
Experts often end up where they started as beginners. If you've never seen the word valet, you might pronounce it like VAL-it. If you realize the word has a French origin, you would pronounce it val-A. But the preferred pronunciation is actually VAL-it. Beginning musicians play by ear, to the extent that they can play