Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,747 posts.
Most widely-used programming languages have at least one regular conference dedicated to discussing it. Heck, even Lisp has one . It’s a place to talk about the latest developments of the language, recent and upcoming standards, and so on. However, C is a notable exception. Despite its role as the foundation of the…
I remember having a discussion with a more tenured coworker, with the subject being the impending departure of another coworker. I said, “man, it’s going to be rough when he leaves, considering how much he’s done for us over the last several years.” The person I was talking to replied in a way that perplexed...
Why reasonable explanations are one of the easiest ways to avoid changing anything.
By structuring the comments on Hacker News using a predefined response_scheme for the LLM, I’ve tried to get a feeling for current job market and trends.
More than 2 years ago, I decided to try to create a brief, digestible manual on the expectations of management for senior engineers at my company who are considering making the shift. At the time, …
A trip deep into a retrocomputing jungle.
There is a special feeling I get on a Sunday evening. Sunday is the weekend and I am home relaxing with my family after a well deserved break. But Sunday evening is the end of the weekend, the end of
A messy experiment that changed how we think about AI code analysis Last week, I watched our AI choke on a React codebase - again. As timeout errors flooded my terminal, something clicked. We’d been teaching AI to read code like a fresh bootcamp grad, not a senior developer. Here’s what I mean.
January 2012 A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying. This caught my attention because earlier we'd noticed a pattern among the most…
Last Friday was my last day at Google. This article is a reflection on the last seven years of my life, thinking about what was important and what I'll do differently in the future.
technology as if people mattered
I’m one. We’re not exactly common on the ground; my profession, apparently not content with having excluded a whole gender, is mostly doing without the services of a couple of generations.
All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.
Why software organizations should prefer genuinely good arguments to weak arguments dressed up with data and metrics.
AI was supposed to empower junior developers. In reality, it has become a tool that makes seniors more valuable while exposing the gaps in software culture.
The internet is not a dumptruck and neither am I
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
In the first 45-minutes the market was open the faulty software deployment sent millions of child orders into the market resulting in 4 million transactions against 154 stocks for more than 397 mil…
Over the last month I've had so many 'fails' from (mostly) large companies that my twitter timeline has started to read like failblog. Have we given up?
It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the coverup. Richard Nixon and Watergate Getting asked by reporter about where I went to school made me remember the day I had to choose whether t…
I recently read a story here titled “We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made.”
One of the key elements of Google's software engineering culture is the use of design docs for defining software designs. These are...
To the occupant(s) of E15-351 Re: About the window. Hi. My name is Ethan Zuckerman. From 2011-2020, I enjoyed working in this office. I led a research group at the Media Lab called the Center for Civic Media, and I taught here and in Comparative Media Studies and Writing. I resigned in the summer of… Read More »To the…
Here is a realization I made recently. I'm sitting in a room full of smart people. On one side are developers who understand the ins and outs of our microservice architecture. On the other are the fro
