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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,087 posts.
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‘Give away your Legos’ and other commandments for scaling startups
Molly Graham helped forge a work culture at Facebook that's withstood huge amounts of growth. Today, she's something of a rapid scaling expert. Here's the key to doing it right, she says.
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Best Practices – Why I Hate Them
I hate the expression “best practice”, it’s so, so often used by someone to justify the application of cargo cult without actually understanding why.
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My first industry job: lies, deceptions, and layoffs
My first job was both a blessing and a nightmare. It taught me more about the world than about software development, but those lessons were invaluable.
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SRE Doesn’t Scale
We encounter a lot of organizations talking about or attempting to implement SRE as part of our consulting at Real Kinetic. We’ve even discussed and debated ourselves, ad nauseam, how we can apply it at our own product company, Witful. There’s a brief, unassuming section in the SRE book tucked away towards the tail…
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Reflecting on Four Years at Databricks
Today marks my 4th year anniversary at my current employer, Databricks. It's been a good run, and this is a great chance to reflect on the journey so far. This post is as much for me to organize my own thoughts as it is for anyone else to read.
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Facebook Recruiter Correspondence
A brief exchange with a Facebook recruiter in the summer of 2020
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My Emotions as a CEO
I stepped down as CEO in October 2020 after nine years at CircleUp. I will be a CEO again. There were parts of the role I loved and it was the best job I ever had. During my transition, I’ve had ti…
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How to Evaluate Startup Offers
If you're joining a startup for money, you're doing it for the wrong reasons, but that doesn't mean that money shouldn't factor into your decision. You can build financial models around salaries and equity, and I'll show you how to do that below.
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Multitasking Doesn't Work
When we think we’re multitasking, most often we aren’t really doing two things at once, but instead, individual actions in rapid succession.
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Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer
Important, Read This First You’re about to read a blog post with a lot of advice. Learning from those who came before us is instrumental to success, but we often forget an important caveat. Almost all advice is contextual, yet it is rarely delivered with any context. “You just need to charge more!” says the company […]
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Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)
One year ago, I quit my day job to work on Zig full time . Since then, the project has seen a steady growth in funding. Thanks to the people donating, Zig is on track to become fully sustainable before my savings run out.
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The Skill of Org Design
Building effective organisations is a remarkably useful, if rare, skill. This is what it looks like, what it consists of, and how to tell if someone has it.
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Is 40 the New 60?
Here's a funny story: I've been using and teaching Python for over 20 years, and designed its built-in set module, but nobody would hire me as a Python programmer when I was laid off by RStudio in February. I was "too senior" for every developer role I applied for, even when the first paragraph of my cover letter said…
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It takes a PhD to develop that
In light of recent events regarding the performance of the Windows terminal 1 , I thought it would be worth spending some time on this topic, since it uncovers a few problems that are pestering the software industry.
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What Happened to Treehouse?
In September 2021, online coding school Treehouse laid off close to 90% of its staff without severance pay.
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Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
My housemate the other day asked me something to the effect of “How can Software Engineers call themselves engineers when there’s no rules, governing bodies, or anything to stipulate what true Software Engineering is?”
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The greatest resume I've ever seen
He had zero cloud experience ... or did he?
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In software, when an engineer exits the team
My perspective when a team member gives their notice
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Why is everything so hard in a large organization?
Update : this post has comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28692026 You're a member of a team that is part of a large organiza...
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The Value of In-House Expertise
An alternate title for this post might be, "Twitter has a kernel team!?". At this point, I've heard that surprised exclamation enough that I've lost count of the number times that's been said to me (I'd guess that it's more than ten but less than a hundred). If we look at trendy companies that are within a couple…
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What does my engineering manager do all day?
I officially transitioned from a lead frontend engineer to a senior engineering manager this year and wanted to provide some insight into…
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How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
A survey of how tech projects run across the industry highlights Scrum being absent from Big Tech. Why is this, and are there takeaways others should take note of?
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The Case for ‘Developer Experience’
How are developers supposed to manage and coordinate fast-moving, heterogeneous systems including maintenance & operations — and free themselves to build?