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Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
Friday was my 9 year anniversary of starting as a Developer Evangelist at Twilio. Monday I was laid off.
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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How to run a miserable code review
Code reviews are a performance nobody paid for
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Things I did wrong as a professor (2016)
I really screwed things up as a young faculty member at Harvard. It worked out OK in the end, but, man, I wish I could go back in time to w...
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Code quality only matters in context (2019)
I used to obsess about code quality earlier in my career. My experience indicates that I'm in good company here; a lot of us developers spend so much time growing our programming skills, and that kind of drive comes from intrinsic motivation. We care about what we do, and we want to do it well.
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The Cost Center Trap
In the 1960’s, IT was largely an in-house back-office function focused on process automation and cost reduction. Today, IT plays a significa...
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How to Pay Professional Maintainers
To successfully fund Open Source projects, companies should: pay the maintainers; pay them real money; pay for maintenance; and keep paying them.
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Who took a chance on you?
Many folks get to experience some of their goals because someone, somewhere along the way, gave them a shot. They took a real chance based on something they felt or saw (vs historical evidence per se).
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Mistakes Programmers Make when Starting in Machine Learning
There is no right way to get into machine learning. We all learn slightly different ways and have different objectives of what we want to do with or for machine learning. A common goal is to get productive with machine learning quickly. If that is your goal then this post highlights five common mistakes programmers […]
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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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The consequences of task switching in supervisory programming
the future of senior developers, junior developers, more on cognitive debt, DevEx versus AgentEx, the role of IDEs, consequences of task switching in supervisory programming
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Fighting micro-burn-out
Our emotions ride like a roller coaster -- we've all heard that phrase but it's different when you're actually living it. Noah Kagan believes that the real successful entrepreneurs are the ones that can deal with difficult times the best; here's some tips on how to do that.
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Let's Stop Asking "Why Do You Want to Work for Us?" In Interviews
Most people want to work for your company for money, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
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Notes from an Interviewer
These days I find myself interviewing quite a few candidates. Some are good, some aren’t. So it goes. However, there is another group who I feel could be good but just aren’t showing it…
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The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect (2008)
[ Updated (06/16/08): Here’s a real-world project review memo , written several years ago, that described (among many other things) the Dead Sea effect. ]
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Technical Interviews Make Me Cry
First, let me clarify one thing for those of you who've never dated me: I cry. A lot. When I can't get my vagrant box setup correctly afte...
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Coding skill vs. employee skill
DRUPAL Bootstrap Upgrade: MIKE IT
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Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
Forget about the y-intercept; slope is the only thing that matters in the long run.
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Applied Machine Learning Is a Meritocracy
When making a start in a new field it is common to feel overwhelmed. You may lack confidence or feel as though you are not good enough or that you are lacking some prerequisite. You will explore these issues in this post and learn that such feelings can lead to actions that can consume a […]
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Please Stop Asking Me to Speak About Women in Technology
I was recently recommended as a pinch-hitter keynote speaker for a Linux conference by a friend who wasn’t going to be able to present due to a scheduling conflict. She put me in touch with the conference organizers, and they reached out to me with the exciting email subject “We want YOU to keynote [conference…