Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,748 posts.
I was talking with a friend the other day about that perennial subject of conversation in the Valley, Google. And finally she gave me the clue that made the whole place make sense. “It’s about infantilizing people,” she explained. “Give them free food, do their laundry, let them sit on bouncy brightly-colored balls…
Over the course of my career as a developer I’ve been involved in a bad management situation more than once.
Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical sp…
Personal site of Alex Reichert
A habit for addressing two-way decisions.
For some people, a 40-hour workweek is something to aspire to; for others, it’s still too much time taken up by a job. If you fall into that second category, if you want more time for hobbies, family and friends, or working on your own software projects, you too might dream of working less than full time. But how do…
I've been rejected by a lot of people and organizations over the years. The number of my rejections became so comical, that my parents put together a book. This was a special book, since many of...
When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad. This was shortly after I’d started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the “obvious” hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, “management”) one gets in graduate school is totally ineffective. Most graduate…
The Official Web Site of Nicholas C. Zakas
Why are we still using old 1990’s cap tables and the same tiny option grants for employees as we did back then? Is that fair? To whom? Is…
From the depths of the IT world, there are things that you only learn through experience.
My father passed recently, and he was twice my age. I am approximately the same age that he was when I was born, and I am now “the old generation” - there’s no one left in the generation above me.
Stamina is one of the most universally useful traits you can develop. It's a more broadly applicable advantage than things that are situationally useful.
If you believe that sales fix everything, it follows that most startups fail because they don’t ship a great product in a growing market before they run out of money. Assuming you’ve picked an explosive market, how do you go about building a great product?1
I feel badly for Paul Graham because he's being made out to be something I am sure he is not. But the brouhaha that he unleashed about women founders, women coders, and women hackers is a good thing because we ought to be having a broader conversation about these issues. Paul asks "God knows what […]
Timo Zimmermann talking about software engineering, leading teams, consulting and start ups.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
I say to you the same things I say to everyone, but it's good.
