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How GitHub Works: Be Asynchronous
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 351 posts.
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Want to be a leader? Wash the Dishes When Nobody Else Will.
When you're starting a business, you have to wear a lot of hats. You don't have an HR department, or an IT department, or a marketing department, or any specialized department, so if a press...
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How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub
2008 is a leap year. That means that three hundred and sixty six days ago, almost to the minute, I was sitting alone in a booth at Zeke’s Sports Bar and Grill on 3rd Street in San Francisco. I wouldn’t normally hang out at a sports bar, let alone a sports bar in SOMA, but back then Thursday was “I Can Has Ruby” night…
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Never say “no,” but rarely say “yes.”
"Focus" requires saying "no" to most things, but there's a way to do it that allows you to say "yes" exactly when it matters most.
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Everyone sucks at interviewing. Everyone.
Interviewing is broken. Has been for years. This rigid commitment everyone seems to have to the standard resume/cover letter/interview system of hiring is just plain insane.
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Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)
Everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1%. Martin Fowler: “We are still working hard to hire only the very top fraction of software developers (the target is around the top 0.5 to …
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The most difficult CEO skill: managing your own psychology
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
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Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don't vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren't they paid 10x as…
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There is no place for just shitting all over other people's work
“Shit from the fucking Mac App Store, ‘designed’ by people who think they get interface design.” That’s the byline for Read the fucking HIG, a blog that pretends to expose apps in the Mac App Store which violate Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. Let’s t…
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Success, and Farming vs. Mining
Let’s come up with an analogy and then torture it like we’re the Cheney administration: imagine you’ve just purchased a plot of land. What a...
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When you want to quit because it's just not worth it
Are you crying in the shower because you can't handle it anymore? Beyond Impostor Syndrome: Complete melt-down? Well, at least you're in good company.
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The unfortunate math behind consulting companies
Hiring even one person creates a lot less profit than you'd think, and launching a product rarely works out. Here are some tips for consulting companies.
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How 1 HN post compelled me to leave Intuit and create a new startup for startups
On October 26, 2010, Shereef Bishay - of BetterMeans and the recently launched ClassParrot - told the HackerNews community about some copywriting work I did for him:
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MIT professor's hack to recruit students
The Library Innovation Lab is growing knowledge and community by bringing library principles to technological frontiers.