Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,087 posts.
Today marks the end of a crazy six year journey for me at Microsoft. I clearly remember my brutal first 8 months at this company as I worked with lawyers, marketing folks and execs to figure out if and how we could release IronPython as an open source project from Microsoft. The final approval for that release came…
If you hang around technology companies long enough, you or someone you know may experience “burnout” – a state of emotional exhaustion, doubt and cynicism. Burnout can turn productive emplo…
I know that many of my blog readers have subscribed my RSS Feed only for my monthly income reports. And as I want to make you happy here is my report from last month. April have ended over two week…
Here is my one piece of advice to you. The single most important thing to do as soon as you make it back to your house with that box full of stuff:
[Timely note! We're hosting a Y Combinator Meetup in Seattle on Thursday Feb 25... details here!] March 3 is the deadline for YC’s Summer 2010 session. I figured that I ought to throw my thoughts out there on the decisions that lead up to the application, the app itself, and... Continue Reading
For decades we have known that some people are 25 times more productive than most in software engineering jobs. We also know that there are “gelled teams” which are consistently 10 times more productive than most across the whole project lifecycle.
Jeff Dean of Google did an excellent keynote talk at LADIS 2009 . Jeff’s talk is up at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/talks/dean-keynote-ladis2009.pdf and my notes follow:
As a bootstrapped software company, Fog Creek couldn’t afford to hire customer service people for the first couple of years, so Michael and I did it ourselves. The time we spent helping customers t…
Google's engineering hiring is unique as far as I know. Patterned after faculty hiring by top universities, Google engineering had no hirin...
When it comes to acquisitions, there are only two things worth buying: products and customers. When you buy either, you’re buying a solid stream of revenue. All you have to do is not fuck it up. That’s harder than you think, but the good news is that there is room for error. Fuck it up …
"We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me...
A guide to surviving graduate school, from the perspective of what I wished I had known at the start but had to learn the hard way instead.
I've now stopped accepting new versions, so please don't send me any more. However, there has been such a strong reaction to this that I intend to offer another opportunity for people to write simple code and have it analysed and compared with others.
If there’s one thing I’ve been surprised by while trying to start startups, it’s the extent to which the business landscape is shaped by law. Skin Cancer One of my first serious s…
You want to get something done. But it’s too big to do it by yourself, so you bring in some friends to help out. In your dreams, all your friends just “click”, understand exactly what it is they’re all supposed to do, and do it quickly and effective. In reality, this almost never happens.
Most interesting ideas come to me between 8am and 10am. This is sacred time. The day is young, I am rested, and the coffee is fresh. I spend most of this time i
