Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,087 posts.
Miscellaneous unsolicited (and possibly biased) career advice
Erik Bernhardsson
Progress Beats Perfect
This is a favorite saying of mine. I use it to motivate myself when I feel disheartened about how much I have to learn and improve. If I do ...
Wanted: Software Engineers. Reward: $12,000
Explore Moz’s latest updates and uncover new ways to boost your SEO impact. Stay informed about tool launches, feature enhancements, and content releases, all in one place.
The Difference Between A Developer, A Programmer And A Computer Scientist
How a computer scientist, a programmer and a developer differ in skills, focus and priorities, even though the terms are often used interchangeably.
Master Foo and the Recruiter (2016)
A technical recruiter, having discovered that that the ways of Unix hackers were strange to him, sought an audience with Master Foo to learn more about the Way. Master Foo met the recruiter in the HR offices of a large firm.
Decision Disagreement Framework
How do you disagree with a decision that is not in the best interest of the company? As a leader, how do you enable your team to disagree in a productive way? Learn how with Matter's Decision Disagreement Framework.
Startup Culture
It's with a culture where people can thrive and tackle problems they find interesting. It's not with offering standing desks and beefy computers; every Silicon Valley startup offers that.
Your Worst Enemy Is Yourself
One mistake I see startups make a lot is getting too focused on what is going on around them. They spend too much time trying to figure out what their competitors are going to do. They watch the next hot startup with jealousy and it reminds them of when they were that "shiny new thing" […]
Why I Quit Algorithmic Trading to Do Web Startups
The kernel of this post originated as an overly long answer to a question posed to me on Google+ , "So how come you stopped doing that stuff [automated / algorithmic trading]? Sounds like you'd have enough experience to be a successful algorithmic trader."
AI Coding assistants provide little value because a programmer's job is to think
I've long had a fraught relationship with ToDo lists, because they're very much a double edged sword, but I'm convinced that much of the problem is t ...
Against Pair Programming
Pair programming is where two programmers work together on a single computer. One writes the code, while the other observes and offers suggestions. I'm not talking about debugging or brainstorming together, but this p...
AI can't even fix a simple bug – but sure, let's fire engineers
Reddit discovered the funniest thing in tech this week, and it shows exactly how broken the AI narrative is. The newly released GitHub Copilot agent was given permission to make pull requests on Microsoft’s .NET runtime, and the results couldn’t be funnier. The AI confidently submitted broken code, while human…
Programming interviews turn normal people into a-holes
Subtitle: Yet Another Tech Interviewing Post There are hundreds and hundreds of blogs about how programming interviews suck, how they ask trivia questions or try to ask questions that only fresh graduates would know well (sort binary trees is the classical example). All these theories are correct, but I have
Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
An overview of interview questions at some of Silicon Valley and NYC's largest tech companies
Why I stuck with Windows for 6 years while developing Discourse
I stuck with Windows 10 as my primary OS for 6 years, despite being a Ruby developer. In this blog post I would like to cover why this happened.
Our statement on the results of the Jacob Appelbaum investigation
Seven weeks ago, I published a blog post saying that Jacob Appelbaum had left the Tor Project,...
We don't need a Tech Lead
When it comes to medium to large teams it is quite common the presence of a full-time tech lead responsible for important leadership activities such as:
Google recruitment mistakes: part 3
It has been a while that I have been contacted by a recruiter, and the last few ones were fairly decent conversations, where they made an effort to research me first, and even if they did not get everything right, they still listened, and we had a productive talk. But four days ago, I had another recruiter reach out…
Women in tech - Stop talking, start coding
I read Out of the Loop in Silicon Valley in the NYTimes today, which explores how and why women are under-repesented in tech startups. From the number of retweets I saw and the clicks through bit.l…
Don’t worry that your job is pointless
Software engineer and consultant with >15 years experience. Specializing in product engineering, design systems, and full-stack web development with React and TypeScript.
Advice for ambitious 19 year olds (2013)
“I’m an ambitious 19 year old, what should I do?” I get asked this question fairly often, and I now have a lot of data on what works, so I thought I’d share my response. Usually, people are...