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Seven Levels of Busy
Level 1: NOT BUSY My schedule is wide open. I can choose infinite paths. Zero commitments. The weekend. I sleep like a baby. Life is good, but am I living my be
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,747 posts.
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Move fast, but understand the problem first
Software engineer, etc etc
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How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
AI forced me to abandon evidence-based best pedagogy practices, focus on oral and written exams, and redo most assignments. Here is what we did in 17-645...
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The Management Team - Guest Post From Joel Spolsky
Today's guest blogger needs no introduction. Joel Spolsky one of the best bloggers out there. He also runs one of our portfolio companies, Stack. And his approach to management is unorthodox at times but amazingly effective. I asked him to tell us a little about how he does it. I think you'll enjoy this post, […]
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Writing an engineering strategy
Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just…
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My Institutional Review Board Nightmare
September 2014 There’s a screening test for bipolar disorder. You ask patients a bunch of things like “Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?”. If they say ‘yesR…
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Thoughts on OKRs
OKRs are one of those business ideas that are just simple enough to be dangerous. You think you understand it in a day, and you can see where your company is falling short: lacking focus and underdelivering. You see how clear, measurable goals could improve the situation. Here’s the one sentence version: You set…
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On Being an Engineering Manager
I’ve been acting in the role of Engineering Manager for 6 months now, so it’s a good time to review how things are going. Some of the points below could be obvious to some and not everything will work in all situations, but I hope I can accurately describe my perspective. A little bit of background for you, first, to…
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Reviewing Steve Yegge's Prediction Record
I try to avoid making predictions 1 . It's a no-win proposition: if you're right, hindsight bias makes it look like you're pointing out the obvious. And most predictions are wrong. Every once in a while when someone does a review of predictions from pundits, they're almost always wrong at least as much as you'd expect…
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Action Plan for a New CTO
This post previously appeared in Fast Company. How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company? How not to waste your first six …
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About This Googler's Manifesto
You have probably heard about the manifesto a Googler (not someone senior) published internally about, essentially, how women and men are…
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How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide
On fighting the feeling of "blah".
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Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google
This is why recognizing whether a system is complicated or complex is so important: it shapes how we should approach problem-solving.
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The Cold Email
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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Suffering-oriented programming
Someone asked me an interesting question the other day: "How did you justify taking such a hu...
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I Shipped, Therefore I Am
“Who are you and why are you here?” –Dave Cutler (DaveC)
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Shamelessness as a strategy (2019)
I’ve enjoyed playing a game called Avalon recently. I won’t go too far into the rules, but it’s a hidden role game in the vein of Secret Hitler or Werewolf, where one team is “good”, trying to uncover who among them is “evil”, before the evil team wins.
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Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what…
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