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How (not) to apply for a software job
Advice for how to (and how not to) apply for a software engineering job, particularly for the written parts of the interview process. As a bonus, some tips for your resume/CV.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
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Creator of Vue.js Evan You's Journey from Google Engineer to Open Source Pioneer
In this episode of "Just Ship It," Evan You, the creator of Vue.js and Vite, discusses his journey to becoming an independent open source developer. His dedicat
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How to evaluate a product roadmap, for engineers
Aka, how do I know if a product leader knows what they're doing? There are thousands of articles, courses, and guides on how to build a roadmap for product managers. Even with all these resources, roadmaps often become a point of contention between product managers and their stakeholders. There
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The joys of maintenance programming (2011)
In the old days when I started programming, green programmers trying to build their skills and get experience started out doing maintenance programming. Only the old hands got to write new code. The newbies cut their teeth debugging and fixing musty old code that still worked for the business. I’ve done my share of…
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Don't be afraid to be wrong
Being afraid of being wrong can hold you back - know how to deal with it.
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Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte
Ethan Marcotte's book, "You Deserve a Tech Union," provides a mix of practical guidelines and steps that tech workers can take to form a union.
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I got paid to live in Antarctica
Sharing how I got paid to live in Antarctica, how to get a job on the ice, and everything you need to know about life at McMurdo Station.
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What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
We’re once again at the end of our internship season, and it’s my task to provide a few highlights of what the dev interns accomplished while they were here.
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Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
In the first 45-minutes the market was open the faulty software deployment sent millions of child orders into the market resulting in 4 million transactions against 154 stocks for more than 397 mil…
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Mistakes You Should Never Make (2014)
I was walking to a team meeting where I was going to announce that we would likely have to lay off nearly all of our employees because we unexpectedly had almost no money left, and that it was all my fault.
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What I have changed my mind about in software development
I really like this quote from Jeff Bezos: “Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.” Lately I have been thinking about wha…
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Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
Raylene Yung has spent a decade scaling eng and product teams at Facebook and Stripe. Here's her advice for engineers at every stage of their careers, from IC to org leader.
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What’s wrong with billable hours
I know a bunch of you already have your pitchforks out, so let me start out by establishing some goalposts for my premise. When I’m done, you may still want to skewer me, but at least it’ll be for the right reasons, if you do. Through the rest of the post, I’m going to draw...
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I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency
I'm often asked if I plan to hire more people and grow my own design agency? I don't, and in this article I explain why.
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On Craft
My grandpa -- my Missouri grandpa, who played slide guitar to me when I got homesick on the rare occasions I stayed with them -- grew up on a farm without electricity. He went past eighth grade, which really mattered to him. He loved that I played harp, which he always called "elegant," in an extremely Missouri…
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Becoming a contractor
How many roads must a programmer walk down before you call them a contractor? It’s been about three years since I went down this (bumpy) path, and I finally have the feeling that my contracting business is “bootstrapped”1. Here’s an account of my journey so far, hoping you find it inspiring! 0. Contents Articles about…
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I don’t buy “duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction” (2021)
Note: If you disagree with what’s expressed in this post, I encourage you to also take a look at my more nuanced and comprehensive post on the topic of code duplication, which gives a more thorough refutation of some of the popular ideas around duplication. “Duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction” is a…
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How to find time to learn after work (2017)
My software developer colleagues often ask me where I do get all the time for reading all the tech books or articles, watching conference talks and listening to podcasts. I analyzed my consumption for November and December and here is, what I did (and that's only the tech related content): List
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Prisoners of Google Android development
A real Android release case study showing how a small API-level update caused production crashes, Google Play delays, and limited rollback options.
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Earning the privilege to work on unoriginal problems
The startup world is almost by definition a place where you “live in the future”. Working in an early-stage startup, your whole belief system is based on being able to successfully create something new. Something that will become a great and cherished product, used all around the world. It needs to be this way, or…
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Winner’s Curse: Negotiation Mistakes to Avoid
Imagine that at the beginning of class, a professor produces a jar full of coins and announces that he is auctioning it off. Students can write down a bid, he explains, and the highest bidder wins the contents of the jar in exchange for his or her bid.
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Leaving Haskell behind
For almost a complete decade—starting with discovering Haskell in about 2009 and right up until switching to a job where I used primarily...
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Common mistakes in salary negotiation
We've helped hundreds of people negotiate an average of $50k more. These are the two mistakes we can't undo.
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Broken Ownership
In the ownership trio, we discussed 3 elements: Knowledge, Mandate and Responsibility. This article digs into various broken ownership scenarios where 1-2 of those elements are missing, what are the common symptoms and how to fix them.
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Architecture diagrams enable better conversations
Earlier this year myself and a couple others at DrDoctor did some training in C4 Architecture modelling1. The trainer was really good and over a few sessions with him we got the hang of the method. We went onto use what we had learnt, meeting everything Thursday over the course of 3 months. We focused mainly on…