Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,747 posts.
A breakdown of what software development teams actually cost, what they need to generate to be financially viable, and why most organizations have no visibility into either number.
They Might Never Tell You It's Broken
Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced … the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously… this feeling may last for hours at a tim…
A lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life—probably because that’s the only thing they’ve ever been rewarded for so far.
Right now, my inbox holds media requests from Buzzfeed, Daily Dot, Guardian, Associated Press, and newly, La Repubblica, Italy’s largest…
I've come to a conclusion that I have nothing to show for my 25 years of coding. I am ready to begin and I have a plan.
Random thoughts, articles and projects by a chronic overengineer.
This issue was publicly disclosed on the Homebrew blog at https://brew.sh/2018/08/05/security-incident-disclosure/
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
This post is a fairly exhaustive summary of the things I learned during my recent Silicon Valley job search. It is really quite long, but has been edited aggressively, and I’ve tried to make sure that nearly every point is either actionable, interesting, or both. If you’re currently or may one day be looking for a job…
If it hurts to type you’ll have a much harder time working as a programmer. Yes, there’s voice recognition, but it’s just not the same. So when my wrist and arm pain returned soon after starting a new job I was starting to get a little scared. The last two times this happened I’d had to take months and then years off…
I'm leaving a comfortable job in a big city because there's more to life than whatever this is.
Sapiens and Collective Fictions Recently I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. The basic thesis of the book is that humans require ‘collective fictions’ so that …
As software developers, we're always learning new things; it's practically the whole gig! If we can learn to quickly pick up new languages/frameworks/tools, we'll become so much more effective at our job. It's sort of a superpower.
In the formless days, long before the rise of the Church, all spells were woven of pure causality, all actions were permitted, and death was common. Many witches were disfigured by their magicks, found crumpled at the center of a circle of twisted, glass-eaten trees, and stones which burned unceasing in the pooling…
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over The Technical Interview lately. Many people realize that inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard has basically zero correlation to whether or not someone is actually a good software developer. The most effective programming test anyone’s come up with is still Fizzbuzz. One…
Over the past few years, I’ve interviewed with a dozen or so companies and have completed ~50 or so individual algorithm problems. I’m frequently given feedback that I did a great job at the algorithms problem. In this post, I’m going to share how exactly I approach algorithm problems. Thought Process A guiding…
My TJS model maps professional relationships across seven states, from zero-sum competition to toxic enmeshment, and why collaboration is the peak.
There's a bit more below, but I also wrote a follow-up 5 years after the illustrated guide which may be of interest -- HOWTO: Get tenure .
The one skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t technical. It’s the ability to take ambiguous problems and make them concrete.Retry
