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Software Engineering Laws Everybody Loves to Ignore
Sure, we all pretend to know them, but rarely do we think they apply to us. Your manager certainly doesn't...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,748 posts.
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Code review decision fatigue
Code review innocently asks a staggering question: “does this code look good to you?” It’s not even clear how to start to answer this question – which makes putting off code reviews easy.
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AI must RTFM: Why tech writers are becoming context curators
I’ve been noticing a trend among developers that use AI: they are increasingly writing and structuring docs in context …
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Build a Focus System for Better Work/Life Balance as a Web Developer
An unproductive day leads me to feel like I need to keep working. A focus system can help your days as a developer feel productive, freeing up your personal time for things you enjoy.
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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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Day Rates (2023)
One year ago, I switched from charging project fees to day rates. It’s been transformative on lots of fronts. > Everything below comes with the following preface/caveat: > 1. There’s no univers…
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Levels of Technical Leadership
This document describes why and how a tech company can offer a career path to its engineering technical leaders, that is, different tracks for “deep ICs” versus “broad ICs”. To motivate this evolution, we identify two separate pressure points: from the business, to grow an increasingly skilled and mature technical …
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Startup Equity For Employees
2020 PREFACE: I originally wrote this back in the mid-2000s and have resurrected it by request.
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Frances Hesselbein's leadership story (2022)
A life by example
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Why nobody hires junior developers and what happens next
While the number of job opportunities for software developer skyrockets together with salaries all around the world, fresh grads and junior developers struggle to even get invited for the interviews. Why does it happen and can we do anything about it?
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Job hunting while day-jobbing (2021)
Interviewing is stressful enough, but interviewing while doing your day job?1 Yikes! Well, I just did it,2 and I’m here to tell you that it’s totally …
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From Prison to Programming
I believe that getting underrepresented groups into software development is a good thing. This is not a controversial opinion until you start talking about felons. Today's guest is Rick Wolter. He's an iOS developer who served 18 years in prison for second degree murder. Rick killed somebody and for some that's all…
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What Is a Staff Engineer?
"I've worked with a couple of Staff Engineers on different teams in the past and I've seen them do different things, but I've not been able to pin down exactly what they do." I get this question quite frequently. Sometimes from engineers looking to elevate their roles.
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Resignation
Today I’m resigning from The New York Times. Those are not words I ever wanted to write. Growing up, I never even imagined that I would get the chance to live in New York City or to work in media -- let alone at the paper of record. I’m from a tiny town of a thousand people in the middle of the corn fields of…
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Academia, Love Me Back
My name is Tiffany Martínez. As a McNair Fellow and student scholar, I’ve presented at national conferences in San Francisco, San Diego, and Miami. I have crafted a critical reflection piece that w…
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What non-technical users don’t understand about your software
If you are writing consumer software you have to understand that you and your average user have a very different level of understanding of computers. When you first start doing support it can be a …
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What we get wrong about meetings, and how to make them worth attending
I rely on Google Calendar to tell me where I am supposed to be, when and with whom. When the service collapsed for an afternoon last month, it felt like a teachable moment. For a few seconds, I pan…
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Conway’s Law (2022)
Systems are constrained to follow the communication patterns of their designers.
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On Scaling Mental Models
No Newsletter Next Week I'll be on vacation in the Caribbean, sipping drinks and juggling for Hermit crabs. The Actual Thing I'm a vim user. I've used Vim...
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How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely
Since the last March, like a lot of other people, I was forced to work remotely. It was not the first time, but somehow it went different. I quickly found out that not having a context switch between the office and home forced me into non-healthy behaviors like giving work all the available time.
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A portentous reunion
I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.
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Behind the scenes: the struggle for each paper (2021)
The start of my sabbatical has given me a moment to reflect on my publications. But my CV only shows a list of neatly cataloged papers: title, authors, conference. Each one appearing no different from another. But how each paper ended up published is its own story, a story about people and opportunity.
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How I stopped procrastinating, learned to code, and launched my first product
I discuss the six major barriers that I had to break through in order to go from lurker to launcher.