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Explaining to my parents what I do
My parents don't understand what I do as a quant, so I wrote this to help explain to them. This post goes into the basics of power pricing and the electricity market.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 467 posts.
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Strategy and criteria decision matrix: A framework for decision making
I attended a talk by Evan Moore a while ago, where he described a framework the early team at Doordash used to make decisions and prioritize growth strategies. I was impressed by the systematic way of listing strategies and assigning them weights based on possible impact + predicted effort it would take to execute…
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What I wish I knew about onboarding
Mindset, 100-day plan, and balancing learning and taking action to earn trust.
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The Lost Art of System Administration
I spent a good chunk of my adolescence learning Linux systems administration. I attribute some of my success as a software engineer to the scripting and systems knowledge I picked up while installing, maintaining, and...
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Hacking the bureaucracy to get stuff done (2020)
The Dangerous Professional finds the seams between the policies, and slips inside them to Get Stuff Done
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2 Years at Twitter
I was a Staff Engineer at Twitter’s Build/Bazel Migration team. After two incredible years, November 17 was my last day (I took the voluntary separation offer and resigned, not that it matters). Twitter has been a special place to work for, for its culture of excellence, diversity, and outpouring of care for all the…
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A Message from Signal's New President
On September 12 I’ll be stepping into the role of Signal’s President, a new position created in collaboration with Signal’s leadership. I am thrilled, and I can’t think of a more meaningful use of my time, or a greater honor. I’ve been a friend, admirer, and champion of Signal since it was RedPho...
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My experience as a Unit-18 Berkeley Lecturer
From spring 2021 through spring 2022, I was a Unit-18 Lecturer for UC Berkeley in the EECS department. A Unit-18 lecturer is what is often c...
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Startup engineering hiring anti-patterns (2021)
The most important traps to avoid when hiring startup engineers.
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Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
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What Should You Work On?
David shares how to make the best choices of what to work on in your life. Read here.
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Scrum has failed the developers
But there’s a way out of the misery
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My startup is broken
Whenever I advise (or join!) a startup, one of the first conversations goes something like this: "Oh man. Everything here is broken! It sucks! There's so much to do and not enough people to do it. We're missing so many things, we don't know where to start! The product needs so much work. Marketing needs
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The hero's journey of getting laid off
Culture, technology, & travel once or twice a week. Click to read Back to Humanity, a Substack publication.
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Work Somewhere Dysfunctional
The rewards are great if you can survive…
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Should you work fixed hours, even if you have a flexible schedule?
The beauty of having a flexible schedule, when you are a freelancer, remote worker, or consultant, is being able to work whenever you like. When traveling, you can spend the whole day touring and working at night. Or maybe working in the morning and night, and enjoying the evenings. Whatever you want, it’s your call…
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Eastern European Guide to Writing Reference Letters
Excruciating. One phrase I often use to describe what it's like to read reference letters for Eastern European applicants to PhD and Master's programs in Cambridge. Even objectively outstanding students often receive dull, short, factual, almost negative-sounding reference letters. This is a result of (A)...
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Software engineering books to read and reread
Advanced Web Application Architecture allows you to spot what kind of code you're dealing with:
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Know how your org works, or how to become a more effective engineer
A few months ago, exhausted by a constant stream of people perennially disappointed about reward structures at companies, I made what…
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The case against CS master’s degrees
Around half of all software engineers are self-taught, One way to approximate this number is via the Stack Overflow developer survey . Another rough approximation comes from the fact that over the last decade, typically only 40-60K students graduated each year with a CS major from a US university, whereas the total…
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Virtual offices are not remote-friendly workplaces
The pandemic made evident how much work can, and should, be different. The forced change to accommodate remote workflows also brought to light what I like to call “virtual offices”. Unlike truly remote friendly workplaces optimized for asynchronous communication, these aim to merely transport the office into a virtual…
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Engineers should do customer support and success
The best PLG founders, startups, strategies, metrics and community. Every week.
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Hacks for Engineering Estimates
Engineers often have to ask each other for “estimates”– rough projections for how long projects will take. While some teams do rigorous estimation rituals to varying degrees of success, many situation
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No is a complete sentence
Has someone asked you to do something recently that you know you don’t have time to do but felt like you needed to do anyway? Or has someone tried to get you to help with something and impres…
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Company, Team, Self
Back when I was managing at Uber, I latched onto a thinking tool that I drilled into the teams I worked with: reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third. This company/team/self framework proved itself a helpful decision-making tool, and almost always led to the…
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How to avoid being a secretary for engineers (2018)
If we just see our task as documenting solutions that engineers have solved, it removes the creativity and critical thinking dimension from tech comm. The creative dimension in tech comm comes into play as we identify and solve tech comm challenges, such as devising ways to simplify complexity or otherwise improve the…
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Luck Surface Area: How to Get Lucky In Life
You can't force luck. But you can increase your chances (by a lot) to get lucky. Here's how to do it with luck surface area.