Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,087 posts.
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…
There is a popular movement on Choosing Boring Technology started by article by Dan McKinley, followed by some discussions on Hacker News…
A brief exchange with a Facebook recruiter in the summer of 2020
Open team communication means fewer distractions and more shared context. Why we default to public channels over DMs, and why it isn't just noise.
A guide to effective pair-programming
Too often we see job requirements for development positions with a long series of bullet points: General Tech X everyone has heard about, 5 years Specific Tech Y that came out last year, 3 years Sp…
In September 2021, online coding school Treehouse laid off close to 90% of its staff without severance pay.
Jason Calacanis wants you to save money for your startup, so he has come up with 17 tips on how. The intention is good. Working lean is great and means you probably won’t need outside money. And there’s some good stuff, like don’t buy Microsoft Office and skip the phone system. Bu…
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
This is a guest blog post from Brooke Kuhlmann. Enjoy. Dear developer, Of the many techniques you’ll pick up over the course of your career, one worth investing in early is journaling. Journa…
If you were making a list of things that could go wrong on an seed, angel, or Series A investment, you would have to put the co-founder relationship right up there at the top of the list. Not every startup has co-founders. Some just have one founder. In some ways, that is a bit easier […]
Even though the impacts of LLMs have never been seen before, they feel familiar to earlier assumptions.
Working remotely is a mixed bag. There are a lot of positives... and some negatives. If you’re a remote employee (or considering a remote job), here are my top ten tips that I’ve gleaned in the last six months.
Dear new developer, I ran across this tweet a while ago: If there was only one piece of advice that I wish I had known early in my career as a software dev is that understanding people is more impo…
The Graduate School of Education and the Computer Science Department engaged in a joint research project to advance new approaches to teaching.
The Facebook-era “move fast and break things” startup motto no longer applies in today’s hyper-competitive environment. This is especially true for SaaS startups like Jam, where customers trust and rely on their products to complete their work. If you’ve met anyone on the Jam team, you
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Donald Knuth Earlier today, I came across a post during...
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
I love reading postmortems. They're educational, but unlike most educational docs, they tell an entertaining story. I've spent a decent chunk of time reading postmortems at both Google and Microsoft. I haven't done any kind of formal analysis on the most common causes of bad failures (yet), but there are a handful of…
Leaders often feel proud of their high performers. In reality, having “10x engineers“ in your software organization may be a sign of an organization that is set out to fail in the long run.
Right after getting my degree, I was lucky to be hired into a small but decent R&D department as an embedded software engineer. My first task was to create a Unit Test project and have it run in our build pipeline after compilation. I was not particularly excited about this task, it seemed like busywork to me. I…
Join us for a captivating closing keynote with the legendary Leslie Lamport, Turing Award winner and pioneer in the field of distributed computing. We'll discuss computing history, open source and distributed systems.
I have been a director of engineering for a bit over three years now, and I still hear and read what I call the "old rules" repeated over and over: a director should not spend time coding, good work takes time, protect the team from the business, get consensus before
