2011
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,748 posts.
2012
Do Not Disclose Your Salary to Recruiters
Recruiters are not my most favorite people in the tech eco-system. They’re the people that will contact you on behalf of some client (the company that pays them) in order to try to find new employees. They typically get paid a fairly hefty sum per employee found and if ever there was a moment when the ‘you are the…
2013
Call yourself titles
We constantly question ourselves when attempting anything new for the first time, which is daunting. And what’s worse, it prevents us from doing anything new, so we can’t change who we are. If you’ve always been terrible at sports and want to start working out, the natural reaction after a few attempts is to stop and…
2014
Lessons from six months at Shopify
I’m now six months into Shopify. So far it’s going basically on schedule: as I was told, “Your first couple months you’re going to have zero idea what’s going on. Then around month three you’ll com…
2015
If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers
(The inspiration for this post came from here: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-interview-ee673bc5ef6)
2016
You Don’t Need Permission
I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Suresh, an ex-student I’ve known for a long time. A U.S. citizen he was now the head of sales and marketing for a company in London selling medical devices t…
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
Becoming the person who does the thing
Bad news: your internal identity dictates everything you do. Good news: you can change it
2022
Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
Listen now | "I was shocked with how intense, painstaking, and effective his learning process was"
2023
2024
Omarchy Is Out
My latest love letter to Linux has been published. It's called Omarchy, and it's an opinionated setup of the Arch Linux distribution and the Hyprland tiling window manager. With everything configured out-of-the-box to give you exactly the same setup that I now run every day. My Platonic ideal of what a developer…
2025
If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?
This is a transcript of my keynote presentation for the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo conference on January 8th, 2025. Watch the video here.
2026
Doing Everyone Else's Job
I find it very useful to be able to do everyone else’s job — it helps you learn how they work and what they need, and it helps even more when you need their job done, but they won’t do it themselves.
2027
A good developer has a natural, almost visceral aversion to complexity
Code should be simple. Code should be butt simple. Code should be so simple that there’s no way it can be misunderstood. Good code has no nooks. Good code has no crannies. Good code is a round room with no corners for bugs to hide in. We all know this. So why does most code suck? Because it’s written
2028
There are no adults in the room
Dear new developer, One of the most shocking things I learned when I started working in a professional capacity is that there are no adults in the room. That is not to denigrate everyone at your co…
2029
2030
Agile: 5 years later and you're still doing it wrong
Which values of the Agile Manifesto do you find foolish? If you're going to tar and feather it(Agile), maybe you should start at the source.
2031
2032
2033
2034
Donating my time to grow a VC-funded company: why I quit mentoring at Plato
tl;dr Nonprofit/pro bono organizations I suggest for offering mentoring/seeking mentorship: Mentoring Club [https://www.mentoring-club.com/the-mentors/category/software-engineering] (experienced mentors, EU focus), Coding Coach [https://codingcoach.io/] (aimed at software engineers), Mentors in Tech…
2035
2036
Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice
This is a (very late) reply to Patrick McKenzie's " Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice ". I find much of his advice very sensible, and it might be very helpful to someone in the beginning of their career – assuming they can act upon it (and I really don't know whether my 20-year-old self could…
2037
The Code Review Pyramid (2022)
Table of Contents FAQ When it comes to code reviews, it’s a common phenomenon that there is much focus and long-winded discussions around mundane aspects like code formatting and style, whereas …
2038
2039
2040