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If someone asks if you have any questions, ask a question
Let's revisit one of the most humiliating (and expensive) moments of my life. It happened a decade ago and even today I cringe and seethe when I think about it.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 399 posts.
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My Job Interview at Google (2008)
A while ago I had an on-site job interview at Google. The position I was interviewing for was a Google SRE. SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineering. Site reliability engineers (SREs) are both software engineers and systems administrators, responsible for Google's production services end-to-end. I interviewed…
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Write Libraries, Not Frameworks
Normally when I write about something on here I take the time to fully think-out a point, make a case, address all the major sides of the issue that I can think of, etc.
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On responses to “Bye, Amazon”
Boy, when your I’m-outta-here essay goes viral, do you ever get a lot of input. A few responses came up often enough to be worth sharing. This was via email, Twitter DMs, blog comments, and LinkedIn messages. All of which went completely batshit.
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Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake
Executive Mandates shutdown the value discovery efforts of software teams
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Tackling Webdev as a Bioinformatician: why is it so hard?
The web is amazing and amazingly complex
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I was tricked into thinking I had “grit”
I was tricked into thinking I had tons of grit as a student. I worked hard in school. I put in long hours. I stayed up all night reading and preparing for debate topics, doing homework, writing essays. It was easy for me to burn the midnight oil. I enjoy
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The Framing of the Developer
Who framed Roger Rabbit? Talking about Software Development is about using frames. The prevalent "Backlog" frame is bad for the company and bad for developers.
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Bye, Amazon
May 1 st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
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Why does writing matter in remote work?
In remote work, we communicate primarily through writing. We send messages in Slack. We document projects in Notion. We send meeting invites with a written description of the purpose. We’re writing all the time. Many organizations are working from home at the moment. Thus, writing is even
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Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
People aren't incompetent or lazy, just busy doing other things.
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My First Year as a Freelance AI Engineer
This week marks my one-year anniversary of quitting my full-time job and becoming a freelance AI engineer. I’m writing down my thoughts and experience here so that this might be useful if you are even vaguely interested.
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Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
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Software Development: Mistakes I Made
Recently I revealed the secret of academic success. This was so popular (16000 views!) that I decided I would follow up with the secret of software success – success in producing software. No…
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Tiers of answers to half-baked questions
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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I’ve made a conscious effort to stop apologizing for bugs in my code
Look out, honey, ’cause I’m using technologyAin’t got time to make no apologyThe Stooges, “Search and Destroy” For the last year or so, I’ve made a conscious eff…
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Career advice for people with bad luck
Most career advice on the internet is from people who had some sort of meteoric success.
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I push, therefore I am: two days at Etsy (2013)
Netflix and Etsy ran a brief "developer exchange program" in 2013. Etsy sent one of their best to hang out at Netflix for 2 days. And a few months later, Netflix sent... me. This was a writeup of the experience that I shared with my team at Netflix and the people I interacted with at Etsy. It was fun to write, I…
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Lambda School lays off 19 employees
We help you find a career in tech. Access tips, tutorials and guides from industry experts and stories from current students
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Remote software developers earn more than non-remote developers
This post is an excerpt from my 2020 software developer pay analysis . Read the rest of the analysis here .
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Build a Team that Ships (2012)
I started my first company 15 years go, and I still can’t manage. I suspect that very few people can. With AngelList, we want a team of self-managing people who ship code. Here’s what we do: Keep the team small. All doers, no talkers. Absolutely no middle managers. All BD via APIs. More
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Emotional debt in startups
Three to four years into my startup journey our then CTO Sunil introduced me to a term called “technical debt”. He explained that we would have to account some time to make changes to the product that won’t be seen by customers but that would support us in the long run. I was furious. How […]
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Build versus Buy
A few years ago I was working on a contract negotiation with Splunk, and we kept running into what felt like a pretty unreasonable pricing structure. They wanted some number of millions of dollars for a three year license, which felt like a high price to pay for roughly thirty-two ascii characters in a particular…