Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,748 posts.
The F Word
Back in 2005, when I first joined the SUNY Buffalo CSE department, the department secretary was a wonderful lady named Joann, who was over 6...
New Data Science Certificate Program
Starting in the fall of 2012, the University of Washington will be offering a certificate in Data Science . The program has two sections: one located in Seattle and the other online. The certificate consists of three separate courses each lasting approximately 3 months. Thus the program can be completed in 9 months…
Hiring Employee #1
If you want another pair of hands to screw things up, how do you acquire resumes, pair them down, and identify someone who is going to work well in your company?
Things I learned from 5 years at Vercel
Here are some of the lessons I learned and how I grew as a leader and manager, as well as a bunch of behind-the-scenes photos.
An Intern Guide to a Summer in the Bay Area
Dear Future Intern, Welcome! You just got an internship at this amazing start-up, so you're starting to look for housing and are getting pumped for your summer. Rightfully so - the Bay Area is awesome! I spent my last two summers out here as an intern, first at Facebook and (am currently at my last day) at 2bkco, an…
When I have a slower publishing cadence my blog grows faster
When I started writing online, the advice I got was to publish frequently and not overthink any single piece. The logic was this: the outcome for blog posts is a heavy-tailed statistical distribution—most pieces will be read by barely anyone, but a small subset of outliers will do hundreds if not thousands of times…
Talk Less, Listen More
I spent a whole bunch of time this fall and winter taking calls from young financial advisors. I try to schedule this stuff on Friday mornings when things are a little quieter for me. They DM me or email me and I just say yes. I have 15 minutes for any kid reading my stuff...
Advice I Wish I Could've Given Myself 5 Years Ago
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter .
Reminiscing: The retreat to comforting work
In Work on what matters, I wrote about Hunter Walk’s idea of snacking: doing work that is easy to complete but low impact. The best story of my own snacking behaviors comes from my time at Stripe. I was focused on revamping the engineering organization’s approach to operating reliable software, and decided that it…
It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem
I just started a new job at Microsoft and the hiring process has been on my mind a lot lately. I read articles on the Internet and hear people talking about how hard it is to find good development ...
Interview Frustrations
Update: Here’s the link to the HN discussion about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092964
Code review antipatterns
Code review seems like a great idea, right? Two developers looking at the same code means two chances to spot problems; it spreads understanding of the way the project is evolving; the reviewer can learn useful tricks from reading the author’s code in detail, or spot opportunities to teach the author a useful trick…
What I Learned From Blowing An Interview
Some time ago, I was a development manager with 23 reports spread over four teams.
Giving Up on TDD
You mean the one where he says that he tried it for a few months and then gave up? Yes, I read it.
Has Agile Become Addiction to Instant Gratification?
“Agile” in software engineering has become the de-facto mode of operation for quite some time now. If what Bill Gates said is true, that…
Never Going Back - A Week of Not Eating Lunch at My Desk
According to a 2011 study on the subject, around 80% of us still eat lunch at our desks. I quit eating lunch at my desk and not only has it been incredibly enjoyable, I’m much more productive…
Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I have a spicily optimistic take: I think there's a huge opportunity for junior engineers.
Changing Directions
<p>I have two important announcements:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully “for good”; if not, at least “for now”.</p> </li> <li> <p>As such, the content on this blog is going to shift, perhaps dramatically. I’m going to be writing about a broader range of…
I'm keeping a job search diary on my blog
If you’re here, you probably got redirected from LetMyPeopleCode.com. This is not a scam. LetMyPeopleCode.com was my blog while I was employed in Developer Relations. Now that I’m pursuing other dreams, I’ve decided to brand on my own name, not on clever handles. That means shutting down LetMyPeopleCode.com. Rather…