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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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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
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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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Misidentifying talent
Out of context, you might think they were scouting actors or models, but these are baseball players ("A" is Lloyd Moseby, "B" is Jim Abbott, and "C" is Derek Jeter), ones that were quite good (Lloyd Moseby was arguably only a very good player for perhaps four years, but that makes him extraordinary compared to most…
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What a $500k grant proposal looks like
A walkthrough of my NSF CAREER proposal.
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My favorite essays of life advice (2020)
Life is short • There is no speed limit • How to Be Successful • You and your research • Becoming a Magician • 95th percentile isn’t that good
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The Death of Process
To write great policies, arm those in the future who will kill your darlings
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Maximize value, not quantity
I was chatting with a manager who was once a PO on a team I coached many years ago. This is only my best memory of the conversation (I didn'...
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Against Pair Programming
Pair programming is where two programmers work together on a single computer. One writes the code, while the other observes and offers suggestions. I'm not talking about debugging or brainstorming together, but this p...
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Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries
Daily recently restructured our levels, promotions and salaries in somewhat unusual ways, and we want to share what we’re doing. We’re still early enough in our growth that we can’t compete with companies like Google and Netflix on salary alone. But we can be thoughtful in how
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The harsh truth of video games programming
I've been interested in games programming since I started learning programming as a teenager more than 25 years ago (gasp!) I started with Qbasic and Gorillas.bas, but never understood the code. Of course, I didn't get anywhere at the time, beyond very basic games. I wrote a simple Shoot
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6 months of working at a hypergrowth startup
I joined Scale AI late last summer. It’s been a crazy experience — Scale is growing incredibly fast right now, hitting a valuation of over $7 billion last year and recently signing a $250 mil…
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Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
On looking for alternatives to Slack culture.
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Don’t point out something wrong immediately
This is not a post on a technical topic, but rather on a common pitfall for engineers – we like to point out something wrong the moment we see it. Understandably, we are very good at it. We are basically trained for it. When it comes to code reviews, or design reviews for complicated distributed system protocols, we…
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What are your company's anti-values?
Musing on what makes effective company values.
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Lorinda Cherry, author of dc, bc, eqn has died
Aisha Washington is a global people and culture executive with more than two decades of experience driving enterprise growth through HR M&A integration, workforce AI transformation, high-performance culture, and team
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No one cared about my spreadsheets
The most painful part of writing The Case Against Education was calculating the return to education. I spent fifteen months working on the spreadsheets. I came up with the baseline case, did scores of “variations on a theme,” noticed a small mistake or blind alley, then started over. Several programmer friends advised…
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That wild Ask a Manager story
Ask A Manager had a wild story a week ago. A company interviewed someone, hired him, but when he showed up for work … it was a totally different person. A friend asked, “if this was your hire, and you manager asked you to change your hiring practices to prevent this, what would you do?” Nothing. I would do nothing…
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A walk through Project Zero metrics
Posted by Ryan Schoen, Project Zerotl;drIn 2021, vendors took an average of 52 days to fix secur...
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Interview questions to ask your interviewer
An interview should be a two-way street. Here are some questions you can ask the company during a software engineering interview.
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Grad school is worse for public health than STDs (2019)
(The way you can *really* tell something is horribly wrong is that grad students find PhD Comics darkly funny, not just dark.)
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The dangers of high status, low wage jobs
This tweet first reads as snarky, then insightful, but give it a few seconds and you’ll realize it’s pointing out a real problem. There are many reasons why an industry can become conce…
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I would like a job writing Haskell
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
Update from Tines; The AI-native intelligent workflow platform
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