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Becoming a compiler engineer
I got a job!
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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How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub
2008 is a leap year. That means that three hundred and sixty six days ago, almost to the minute, I was sitting alone in a booth at Zeke’s Sports Bar and Grill on 3rd Street in San Francisco. I wouldn’t normally hang out at a sports bar, let alone a sports bar in SOMA, but back then Thursday was “I Can Has Ruby” night…
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Never say “no,” but rarely say “yes.”
"Focus" requires saying "no" to most things, but there's a way to do it that allows you to say "yes" exactly when it matters most.
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What are your company's anti-values?
Musing on what makes effective company values.
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The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists
The biggest source of waste is not low performers or having too many employees.
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Programmers, teach non-geeks the true cost of interruptions (2014)
Interruptions are one of the biggest sources of inefficiency for programmers. Now, to be fair, they’re probably a big source of inefficiency for everyone, but relatively speaking, they’re worse for programmers. To understand what I mean, let’s take someone whose job is in sales. A lot of the day is probably spent on…
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My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
A classically trained sysadmin shouting into the void.
1301
How to Be More Agentic
On a supposedly difficult thing
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How to detect a toxic customer
A month ago I received a sales inquiry via email for my invoicing software package. The prospect asked if we could complete the questions he had attached in a spreadsheet: I will need the attached questions answered in order to proceed as I can’t get them all answered off your website.
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If you want to transform IT, start with finance
When talking about IT transformation, we often we often talk about ‘culture’ being the problem in making change, but why stop there?
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What a $500k grant proposal looks like
A walkthrough of my NSF CAREER proposal.
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Managing People
I believe almost all first-time founders burn out their first employees – maybe this article helps you avoiding this
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macOS to FreeBSD migration a.k.a. why I left macOS
This is not a technical documentation for how I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD. This is a high-level for why I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD.
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Salary Transparency
Xe Iaso's personal website.
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Laid off for the first time in my career, and twice in one year
Laid Off for the First Time In My Career, and Twice In One Year - Dillon Shook
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From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
It's been almost 2 years since I moved to a team lead role, then to a full-time engineering management position after the expansion of our team. I've been a front-end developer for 7 years before that, and initially I took the "advanced individual contributor" career track before doing the management turnaround. How's…
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Why I close pull requests
I maintain many open source projects on GitHub and elsewhere (over 160 as of this writing). I have merged and/or closed thousands of Pull Requests (PRs) and patches in the past few years, and would like to summarize here many of the reasons I don't merge many PRs. A few of my projects have co-maintainers, but most are…
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No-one knows what they are doing
When I was a child I assumed that all the adults running the world knew what they were doing. Now that I am an adult, I am under no such illusions. Just look at the current British government. They…
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Everyone sucks at interviewing. Everyone.
Interviewing is broken. Has been for years. This rigid commitment everyone seems to have to the standard resume/cover letter/interview system of hiring is just plain insane.
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Not a real engineer (2019)
A short, dark prose poem on being told you are not a real engineer, and the monstrous thing you become instead.
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DevOps is a failure
It’s probably difficult for most people to recall the first time they heard a word, but I remember hearing the word “DevOps” for the first time. I was having a
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The silent majority in software
I was re-reading Nixon’s 1969 “silent majority” speech last week (Smithsonian ran a good breakdown in 2017), mostly because YouTube’s algorithm
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Developers are the autoworkers of our generation
Fifty years ago, an autoworker could provide a middle-class existence for his family. Bought a house. Put kids through college. Wife stayed home. He didn’t even need a degree. That shit’s over. Detroit just went bankrupt. No one’s got it better than developers right now. When
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