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Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022)
40 years ago today: I joined a tiny startup called Sun Microsystems. What a ride! Here’s the never-before-told story of how I arrived at Sun as employee #8! 🧵 I started out in Silicon Valley …
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 311 posts.
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AI Coding assistants provide little value because a programmer's job is to think
I've long had a fraught relationship with ToDo lists, because they're very much a double edged sword, but I'm convinced that much of the problem is t ...
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My takeaways from DjangoCon EU 2025
Here are some of the most interesting things I learned at DjangoCon EU 2025 in Dublin, Ireland, partially written with the help of AI: link to talks
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I just want to code (2023)
I have an angel and a devil sitting atop each shoulder. The angel says, "Just code for fun! What you make can be just for your enjoyment and that's --" the devil interjects, "not enough to get ahead, loser. If you're not coding your next startup then how're you gunna get rich? Coding for fun? Pfft, sounds like the…
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Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI
How to use AI coding assistants without letting your hard-earned engineering skills wither away.
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You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown
Design greatness is defined not by fame or recognition, but by how invisibly and effectively it serves human needs.
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Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work
A field guide to responsible AI-assisted development
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I speak at Harvard as it faces its biggest crisis since 1636
Every week, I tell myself I won’t do yet another post about the asteroid striking American academia, and then every week events force my hand otherwise. No one on earth—certainly no one who reads t…
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Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes
No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue
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Googler... ex-Googler
My role at Google was eliminated.
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Strengths Are Your Weaknesses
The qualities you value most in engineers are also creating your biggest problems. Here’s how to handle this paradox.
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No Pay, No Work; Early Career Lessons
Part 3 of my 12-year journey—what my first rocky job taught me about boundaries and value.
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The best programmers I know
I have met a lot of developers in my life. Late…
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Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
How tech companies make money and why it's important
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The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer
Is something I think about often because I can’t help but wonder if most other jobs are like this.
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Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (2016)
When the story of how I landed a job at Airbnb went viral, I was surprised at how infatuated people were with my negotiations. Media stories portrayed me as some kind of master negotiator—a wily ex...
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Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
I just got off one of the most surreal video calls of my life - a live video call with a candidate who was interviewing to become an L3 software engineer at Kapwing, our online video editing startup. The interview started extremely well - the candidate seemed like a clear
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Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
How time-tested software engineering practices amplify the effectiveness of AI coding assistants.
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Breaking computers taught me to build them
My 12-year journey in software: how breaking computers taught me to build them.
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The reality of working in tech: We're not hired to write code (2023)
"So, is everyone losing their minds yet?" My ex-coworker asked me over yahoo messenger. He quit after getting enraged by new work policies that specifically targeted him. I looked up from my screen,
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Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
A Bed Assembly Drama
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Take this on-call rotation and shove it
At some companies, it is expected that certain engineers will serve as part of a formal on-call rotation. On paper, this seems like a reasonable way to ensure the reliability of the product. In practice, it is a miserable burden and you probably won't even get paid for it.
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Sell yourself, sell your work
I've dealt with any number of technically brilliant people who produce outstanding work. The majority of them never bothered to write down their work and communicate it to others - report writing is too boring, uninteresting, and hard. And irrelevant. Or so they thought.
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How I Choose What to Work On (2023)
A reader, "Moo", asked me to write about my process for entrepreneurship and how I choose what to write on. Despite being a lifelong entrepreneur and being relatively successful at...
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Coding Isn't Programming
Join us for a captivating closing keynote with the legendary Leslie Lamport, Turing Award winner and pioneer in the field of distributed computing. We'll discuss computing history, open source and distributed systems.
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An Interview with Zen Chief Architect Mike Clark
Zen is one of the most important microarchitectures in the history of the x86 ecosystem.
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War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged
All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.
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The Software Engineering Identity Crisis
Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged. AI coding assistants aren’t just changing how we write software - they’re…
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