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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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Staying on the path to high performing teams (2018)
A friend is six months into supporting a sixty person engineering group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of their teams believe they have urgent hiring needs. It’s a great question, and captures a deeply challenging aspect of leading an organization: keeping the path after you’ve established a strategy and while it’s…
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The Software Millionaire Next Door
I've been reading "The Millionaire Next Door" and have so far found it to be a pleasant book with a good message: don't waste your money on silly things and appearance (fancy su…
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Signs you might be in "Survival Mode"
A list of early warning signs that a software team is in survival mode, such as constant urgency, missing context, no time to reduce risk and long stress.
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8 [Startup] Things I’m Better At Now That I’m 30
When you’re 21 years old and working on your first startup, you’re convinced that you’re so much smarter than everyone who tried this before you. You don’t need advice or he…
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Five Year Mission
Behind the scenes - how I'm making redblobgames.com - interactive explanations of game development algorithms and math
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Building personal and organizational prestige
Most months I get at least one email from an engineering leader who believes they’d be a candidate for significantly more desirable roles if their personal brand were just better known. Similarly, when funding is readily available during periods of tech industry expansion, many companies believe they are principally…
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The Ambiguity of Real Work
All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system.Dr. Richard I. Cook, How Complex Systems Fail There’s a wonderful book by the late urban planning professo…
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What happened to all the non-programmers? (2015)
As I looked around and realized for the hundredth time that I was surrounded by people exactly like me, something inside me snapped. I downloaded the latest American Community Survey microdata, fired up R and started calculating feverishly.
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Limitations and pitfalls of the job interview
Better hiring leads to better work environments, less turnover, and more innovation and productivity. When you understand the limitations and pitfalls of the job interview, you improve your chances of hiring the best possible person for your needs.
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The Next Mission
Slides for the brief talk that I gave at a Harvard seminar on privacy and user data organized by John Taysom last week.
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No more rock stars: how to stop abuse in tech communities
Content note for discussion of abuse and sexual violence. In the last couple of weeks, three respected members of the computer security and privacy tech communities have come forward under their ow…
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Things nobody told me about being a software engineer
My dad started teaching me Basic when I was about 7 years old, and since about that age I knew that I wanted to build software for a living. It was obviously a fun and useful thing to do, and something that I could do well. But there is a big — and I mean Grand Canyon-scale BIG — difference between “programming” and…
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The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker
The implicit contract — work hard, stay employed, build a life — is broken.
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Layoff Thinking
Were you recently laid off? I have some, hopefully, helpful thoughts to survive the maelstrom of self-doubt and pain that's swirling around inside your head.
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The Daily Standup Is a Waste of Time
Daily standups feel like a waste of time. I will teach you two new techniques the will make every minute count.
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"My boss says we don't need any engineering managers"
"I'm a VP Engineering at a 40-person startup. My CEO (former engineer) won't let me hire engineering managers. He says we can't afford such luxuries, all hands should write code. How do I make the case for managers?"