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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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Before the Startup
October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell…
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I got robbed of my first kernel contribution
Context Around a year and a half ago, I’ve asked my former company for some time to work on an issue that was impacting the debugging capabilities in our project: gdbserver couldn’t debug multithreaded applications running on a PowerPC32 architecture. The connection to the gdbserver was broken and it couldn’t control…
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Your own company? You can do it (2011)
When I was 17 and a high school drop-out I went to work for a bank. My mom was ecstatic, I had a job, in spite of my failure to ‘get an education’. Never mind that the job that I got was mailroom gofer. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being a mail runner for a bank. And run I did. So fast that…
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My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
Way back in 2013, I started mammoth.js , a library that converts Word documents into HTML. It's not a large project - roughly 3,000 lines - nor is it particularly exciting.
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Downsides to working at a tech giant
Hey everyone, new vlog for this morning. I was in Seattle last week and it made me nostalgic. When I lived there, I made a career decision that cost me a lot, so I wanted to share it with you with...
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Reflections on Being a Female Founder
Not a lot is written about being a female founder and CEO. I used to believe that my journey as a startup founder was the same as any other founder's experience, regardless of gender, in that it is...
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Persisting as a solo founder
I quit my job in January 2020 to build...
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Get me out of data hell
It is 9:59 AM in Melbourne, 9th October, 2024. Sunlight filters through my windows, illuminating swirling motes of dust across my living room. There is a cup of tea in my hand. I take a sip and savor it.
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Always Be Quitting
A good philosophy to live by at work is to “always be quitting”. No, don’t be constantly thinking of leaving your job 😱. But act as if you might leave on short notice 😎. Counterintuitively, this will make you a better engineer and open up growth opportunities. A thread 👇.
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My second year without a job
Reflecting on two years of unemployment: personal growth, financial lessons, and creative pursuits like music and startups. Here's how I navigated year two without a job.
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Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
Apple still charges a $99 yearly developer fee, even if you don't want to publish your app on the Appstore. The provisioning certificate that Xcode provides only lasts one week.
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I hope work from home continues
I just hope my employer continues to allow me to work remotely. Working from home I: Have been exceeding production for the past year Don't have to share a keyboard/mouse/desk with another shift (gross). Do not spend an hour a day(+/- 10 minutes) driving, and save all the money associated
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Options vs. Cash
I often talk to startups that claim that their compensation package has a higher expected value than the equivalent package at a place like Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Snapchat. One thing I don’t understand about this claim is, if the claim is true, why shouldn’t the startup go to an investor, sell their options for…
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Invert, always, invert
man muss immer umkehren - Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
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Costs of running a macOS app studio business
I created The low-tech guys, a brand under which I develop macOS apps for a living. I started this business with a good friend of mine, thinking I could help him stop working long hours at his consulting job and ease into more creative work. However, getting to a state where you earn enough to live off the app sales…
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Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy
When Travis CI turned into a business with employees, one of our ideas was to not constrain people in how much time they take off for vacations. We didn’t track the days people were taking off, and as the people running the company, we didn’t actively encourage people to take times off. In short, we had an open…
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How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)
In this post, I describe the phenomenon of the so-called expert beginner -- someone with mediocre skill who thinks he's an expert.