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Shooting down ideas is not a skill
Criticism can prevent mistakes. It can never create value. Only ideas can do that. The two are not equal contributions, and most meetings get this backwards.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,087 posts.
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Decline of the Dad Job
Before I learnt to read I made sense of the world by conjuring up images in my mind, particularly for abstract concepts. I could count before I could read and had an image for each number. Many of …
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Ship / Show / Ask: A modern branching strategy
Ship/Show/Ask is a branching strategy that helps teams wait less and ship more, without losing out on feedback.
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People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
Why are people so bad at gauging their own interviewing performance? We investigated and dig into the data to see what we can learn.
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Sometimes your job is to stay the hell out of the way
I wrote a piece a long time ago about The Wolf. It's my personal take on the mythical 10x engineer, except that they aren't a myth. They exist. I've seen them.
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My 25-year engineering career retrospective
Reflecting on my engineering career and what I could have done better.
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In praise of “normal” engineers
The best engineering orgs in the world are not the ones with the most (self-pronounced) "10x engineers", they are the ones where normal engineers can show up every day, do good work, and move the business materially forward. Oh yeah -- this is also the best way to build world-class engineers.
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You Guys Are Millionaires Right?
People often ask, “What’s it like to be an independent developer?”, “You guys are millionaires right?”, “Your job sounds awesome, tell me more!”. So let…
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I've mostly stopped reading technical mailing lists
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…
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Job interest not a big predictor of job satisfaction
Interest More Important for Job Performance and Career Choice
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Percentage of Hacker News job postings that mention a remote option 2017-2021
The entire plot is generated by an R script that you can found here. Any suggestions (you can find my e-mail address on the "about" page) are welcome. There's a secondary plot here that displays the raw number of postings (total and remote). Caveats, and why this is just an …
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Waterloo Style
A blog about software development and programming.
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Public speaking for introverts
A few days before I have to talk in front a lot of people I get this queasy feeling in my stomach that won’t go away. I don’t want to eat. I just want to c
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Applying to YC as a Single Founder
In a comment I made on Hacker News , I expressed my desire to write an article about the differences and misconceptions between being a single-founder and having co-founders. This is not that article, but it is related. The application for YC W12 is open, and in response to my comment I received a few emails asking…
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Don't give bullshit advice
I chatted with a young guy last night about his new startup idea. He’s got a vision for a social commerce app with a few cool spins on it. As I listened to him, I was thinking about how I had heard this exact pitch half a dozen times before. I also knew I had a lot to offer him in terms of help. I have a good friend…
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Reversing the technical interview (2017)
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
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Reflecting on Four Years at Databricks
Today marks my 4th year anniversary at my current employer, Databricks. It's been a good run, and this is a great chance to reflect on the journey so far. This post is as much for me to organize my own thoughts as it is for anyone else to read.
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How to Pick Your Next Gig: Evaluating Startups
Samvit Jain writes on startups, the tech industry, machine learning, and what he has learned along the way.
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Helping to Build Cloudflare, Part 2: The Worst Two Weeks
It’s always best to speak plainly and honestly about the situation you are in. Or as Matthew Prince likes to put it “Panic Early”. Long ago I started a company in Silicon Valley which had the most beautiful code.