Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,748 posts.
Society rewards extroverts. They get the job, the money, the girl (or boy), and the front page. Fortune 500 companies are run by 499 extroverts, plus Bill Gates. There are 435 extroverts in the House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate, two from each state. In fact, the only introvert in the District of Columbia…
Many of my students have been asking questions lately about how to do technical interviews, so I've decided to write about my interviewing experiences. I will start by giving a number of anecdotes because they're interesting to everyone, but the later parts of this post are mainly targeted at prospective students who…
I started a reading group in 2021, a few months after joining Microsoft as a new grad on the Azure Databases team. The group was initially focused on database internals, which was my favorite subject at UW. Databases touch so many areas of CS: compiler construction in the query engine, memory management with the…
A good example of a simple looking, but hard to use correctly, API is one which takes two or more parameters of the same type. Let’s compare two function signatures:
Because your lifeblood, Revenue and Funding, are drying up
How understanding cognitive load and team capacity can help you decide on an architectural style
As I get older, I increasingly think about whether I’m spending my time the right way to advance my career and my life. This is also a question that your company asks about you every performance cycle: is this engineering manager spending their time effectively to advance the company or their organization?…
Ken Norton is an executive coach, writer, and speaker. Bring the Donuts is the home for his essays on product management and product leadership.
Years ago (early 1992), I attached myself to this crazy skunkworks project that was using this weird language called Smalltalk. "Object Orie...
Note: Enter your email to get notified when we launch our job board for hot remote companies! “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don’t ask what seat.” -Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook One of the greatest myths about remote work is that there aren’t phenomenal companies that are hiring remotely. […]
Instead of asking “Is university good?”, ask “Do I have something more compelling to do?”. Instead of “Should I do a PhD?”, ask “Where can I find the best environment to grow as a researcher?”.
There are many ways to evaluate a developer. Should we use quantitative metrics or stick to qualitative ones?
Every now and again, someone emails me and asks for very general advice. ("How do I change the world?") With the caveat that I've only lived a fraction of one life, and am still trying to figure things out, here's the advice I'd give past me.
You should hire an old programmer. It’s true! Sure.. older programmers are not going to work as many hours as someone fresh out of college. They have kids and spouses and mortgages and softball games to attend. They won't hang out at the office playing Xbox and ping-pong all night. They will not work 80 hour weeks and…
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
What it looks like to do a PhD: the view from my desk. Recently, I have been talking to many prospective Computer Science PhD students ...
From time to time I’m toying with the idea to give a lecture to newcomers in the IT industry (systems or software engineers). Here are some of the points that I would include in it: Human fa…
