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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,748 posts.
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We Looked for Work as a Software Development Team
Part of this story is a common one. Established company in an industry undergoing major disruption hires developers to innovate back to viability. Management lacks clear vision of what that means and so chops and changes ( not pivots, that’s something else) technology strategy several times. After two years of hard…
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How to Safely Think in Systems
While there are a decent number of folks out there modeling systems, there’s a much larger group of folks who think of themselves as systems thinkers but utilize techniques like modeling rather casually (a polite way of saying that they don’t use them). Even with modeling tools available, I’ve often taken the shortcut…
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A decade of writing at Mozilla
Today—April 3, 2016—marks the tenth anniversary of the day I started working at Mozilla as a writer on the Mozilla Developer Center project (now, of course, the Mozilla Developer Network or MDN). T…
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What does my engineering manager do all day?
I officially transitioned from a lead frontend engineer to a senior engineering manager this year and wanted to provide some insight into…
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OS X Isn't for Developers
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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What makes developers productive?
Many ingredients go into developer productivity. Some are obvious and easy to measure (build times are an easy example to point to). But I think we tend to miss other important factors, perhaps because they are hard to directly measure. For example, no system collects a number that shows how well each developer…
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Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
The start of my sabbatical has given me a moment to reflect on my publications. But my CV only shows a list of neatly cataloged papers: title, authors, conference. Each one appearing no different from another. But how each paper ended up published is its own story, a story about people and opportunity.
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Open Source and Saying “No”
An Open Source project can balloon to extreme sizes and then lose purpose of why it started - a rant.
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How the Digg team was acquihired
About a year after the catastrophic Digg V4 launch, our last-ditch experiment to salvage the site showed a spark of hope. We’d cajoled our way into a Facebook beta that allowed us to publish each Digg users’s read articles into their Facebook newsfeed, sending every clicking friend directly to Digg’s permalink page…
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Being Glue
Slides and notes for the Being Glue talk.
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Get It Done
Too often people do the best they can with what they have when they should instead get it done
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You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
My friend Csongor recently published a computer science paper that’s super interesting if you’re as big a nerd as I am. The details are too much to go into here, but suffice to say, it lets us do a lot of things I’d always been told were impossible.
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How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords
How cold calling succeeded where AdWords failed, producing a 100% conversion rate and all the information needed to create a scalable business.
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Getting More Strategic
Strategy – how to be strategic, and how to be seen as strategic – is one of my ongoing obsessions. Years ago, I read Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, and it’s guided my thinking ever s…
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“Working Too Hard And Not Getting Anywhere”
Continuing the case method on MBA Mondays, I am going to tell a story about a business model pivot that was not a full business pivot. In the lull between Flatiron and Union Square Ventures, I made a few angel investments and the best one was in a company called TACODA that went on to […]
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Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
So, my latest post went viral. And with virality, you get a ton of comments that you must reply to. I don't want to reply in HN/Reddit/Whatever to prev...
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How boring should your team's codebases be
Thoughts on how to keep the novelty in a team at the correct level for easy onboarding
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