Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,086 posts.
How To Make a Quick Buck
In 1992 I had bought a license to a little known real time micro kernel based operating system called QnX.
Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
I once thought I had traveled a unique career path. Graduating from college with a degree in computer engineering and electrical engineering I was on fire to be a manager. My dad had worked for the same electrical contractor for 30-something years and I knew everyone from the Chairman of the Board d
Trying new programming languages helped me grow as a software engineer
Use new programming languages knowledge to level up your Software Engineer career!
CEO
In this post I’m going to try to give potential and actual CEO’s (and other C level execs to some extent) some actionable advice when it comes to how they conduct themselves in the hope that this will at some future date save some of you a great deal of misery and in some cases charges of misconduct or worse. My hope…
Be a thermostat, not a thermometer (2023)
As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of thos...
Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
After a particularly rough couple of months last year, our team (of six) decided it was time for a radical move. At the point we were so downtrodden that our small hope that it would at least provide something new was enough of a motivation for us to decide on a two month experiment: we would try mob programming.
Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake
I bought the iPad Pro M1 chip in hopes of a lightweight, fast, multi-purpose device that I could also code on.
Surviving Burnout (2015)
The first thing I know about burnout is this: burnout happens when we become locked in a cycle of caring about the results of our actions but having no meaningful control over those outcomes. I first learned this while reading about social workers, but the problem is abdundant in tech. I’ve seen it play out in every…
Fake recruiter lured aerospace employee with trojanized coding challenge
ESET researchers uncover a Lazarus attack against an aerospace company in Spain, where the group deployed several tools, including a publicly undocumented backdoor we named LightlessCan.
Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer
I'm a full-time creator. With remote work becoming more common in tech, I get more messages from people asking: how can they do what I do?
The benefits of learning in public
Learning in public helps me grow as an engineer and seems to benefit others too. Here's why I should do more.
Letter to Myself in Late 2008
[I originally wrote and distributed this post to Y Combinator founders and have been encouraged to share it publicly, so here it is.]
No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams
Sharing a reluctant, "node & postgres" approach to engineering management for early-stage startups
Accident Forgiveness
Charging for resources you didn't mean to buy is bad business.
Stripe can make automatic LLCs but a wire transfer from Citi nearly ended me
Big banks lack the DNA to build self-serve
NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency
Frivilous dependencies are the enemy of maintainability.
Lessons learned as a React contractor
I didn’t know I was looking for it, but when I found it something clicked.
If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else
When you look online for advice about entrepreneurship, you will see a lot of "just do it": The best way to get experience... is to start ...
The silent majority of experts (2012)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.