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How I feel quitting my own startup
I left my own startup after almost 5 years of hard work. It was a tough decision, but a necessary one.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
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The Risks of Staying Put
Friends! Pals! Treasured work associates! Last month Mandy Brown wrote about how she struggled to quit her job and this bit hit me like a sledgehammer: “I...
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It's companies' fault we don't want to return to the office
It wasn't appealing to begin with
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Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013)
Productivity is one of my pet topics, because it's always dogged me a bit, especially early in my career. I'd pull long days and nights and then realize I only actually worked (as in, typing in code, debugging stuff, and thinking about problems and their solutions) maybe 20% of the time. Upon talking to coworkers…
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Limits of Programmer Productivity: A lesson from Fred Brooks
Fred Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month in 1974, describing the lessons he learned leading IBM’s OS/360 project during the 1960s. As technology goes, it’s ancient. Consider the workflow for a “debugging run”:
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Two years of teaching high school CS
(This post is also now also listed on the Pickcode Blog) Leaving Teaching I’m posting this on my last day teaching high school computer science. In the pas...
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DevOps Is Bullshit (2022)
A Critique of How We've Fooled Ourselves for Years.
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On the slow productivity of John Wick
I found myself recently, as one does, watching the mini-documentary featurettes included on the DVD for the popular 2014 Keanu Reeves movie, John Wick — ... Read more
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New York State Senate passes prohibitions on non-competes
Monumental changes to New York law on non-compete agreements appear imminent. On June 7, 2023, the New York State Senate approved two bills concerning non-compete agreements. The first, Bill No. S3100A, proposes a ban on all non-compete agreements, while the second, Bill No. S6748, proposes a limited ban of certain…
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Dumb and Gets Things Done (2010)
Someone once asked Napoleon how he decided where to assign soldiers. Napoleon's reply was that it's simple: soldiers are either smart or dumb, lazy or energetic. The smart and energetic I make field commanders. They know what to do and can rally the troops to do it. The smart and lazy I make generals. They
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Getting to know the right people (2022)
This page has moved to https://drmaciver.com/notebook/2022/06/getting-to-know-the-right-people/ .
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Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
Gamification works too well on me. I'll do anything for a high score, to complete a progress bar, or to unlock an achievement.
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Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more.
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Growing from engineer to manager
Your success is now determined more by the success of your team than by your individual contributions.
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Why you’re going about recovering from perfectionism all wrong (2021)
Stop murdering your village of weirdos.
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Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)
Digg was having a rough year. Our CEO left the day before I joined. Senior engineers ghosted out the door, dampening productivity and pulling their remaining friends. We had only one remaining shot at revival, launching our two-years in the making rewrite: Digg v4. It did not go as planned.
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The work is never just “the work” (2022)
A deep dive on why projects always take longer and a framework to improve future estimation
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I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know (2016)
(Spoiler: trusting your contributors works) Some years ago, I polished up and released an abandoned project for storing financial data in Django. It let you declare “Money” fields on your models, dealing with proper storage and currencies for you. My use case for the library, django-money eventually faded, but it…
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When feedback is not a gift
Feedback is the lifeblood of getting better, but be careful who you accept feedback from.
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I Am No Longer Speaking at RustConf 2023
I will no longer be speaking at RustConf 2023 about A (Possible) Future for Compile-Time Programming.
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Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor – how companies respond
Several tech companies face a fresh problem after cutting jobs: their rating on Glassdoor nosedives. But there’s a way they manage to fix this. I show what companies are doing - and why.
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The time I accidentally spent a year combatting fraud
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time enjoying the Darknet Diaries podcast and it’s compelled me to finally share the story of the most intense year of my
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Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple
I retired a year and a half ago after having worked for twenty-six years as a programmer for Apple. I’m not sure which would have been more surprising: if I had continued programming in my spare time after I had retired or if I never programmed again.
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The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change is written by Tanya Reilly and published on October 25, 2022, by O’Reilly Media. Favorite Quotes Early in your career, if you do a great job on something that turns out to be unnecessary, you’ve still done a great job. At the…
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Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
I like to write, and occasionally I idly consider the possibility that I should do it for a living. Then I remind myself: writing is a…
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I've mostly stopped reading technical mailing lists
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…