Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 259 posts.
I got let go from my job - elimination of role, they're claiming - so I'm understandably a bit raw. So was my boss from what it looked like, though he still has a paycheck and benefits whereas I do not. Still, rawness is an excellent time to reflect on
For over 20 years, the meditative focus of programming has been one of the best parts of my job. Every week I’d spend countless hours in a flow state, which quiets the default mode network. The DMN is responsible for daydreaming/reflection but also rumination/worrying, so quieting it settles your mind. If I didn’t…
Nominations are now open for this year’s appointments to the F-Droid Board of Directors! We are looking to select up to four volunteer directors to serve for...
Yesterday I was looking at YC jobs to see if there were any interesting small startups hiring in my area (while I otherwise love my current fully-remote job,...
Ask a team what they shipped this year and you’ll get a list. Ask what they killed and the room goes quiet.
There is a popular idea that substantial wealth belongs mainly to entrepreneurs. We celebrate founders, investors and business owners so loudly that a career person can begin to believe that employ…
The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of…
Criticism can prevent mistakes. It can never create value. Only ideas can do that. The two are not equal contributions, and most meetings get this backwards.
I wrote a piece a long time ago about The Wolf. It's my personal take on the mythical 10x engineer, except that they aren't a myth. They exist. I've seen them.
I have been a director of engineering for a bit over three years now, and I still hear and read what I call the "old rules" repeated over and over: a director should not spend time coding, good work takes time, protect the team from the business, get consensus before
This is a memo I published internally to my team at Monarch. I’m sharing it more publicly in case it helps other software engineering teams that are managing the crazy times we’re exper…
I submitted Inkwell for iOS to Apple for review on April 21st. It has gone through numerous rejections, code changes, resubmissions, clarifications, one phone call, and one appeal to the review board, which I’m still waiting to hear back on.
I can hardly remember first experiencing ChatGPT. Its become so infused into my professional life, that going back to that first moment, or moments, is difficult. Instead a blur of a few moments. At some point, I realized it was a better Google. It was very similar to when Stackoverflow took off, and how Google search…
The year was 2015, halfway through my Computer Science bachelor’s degree. I had spent a few months contributing to open source and my confidence levels were high, so I thought: why not aim for a summer internship at Microsoft? Microsoft, of all places, might sound like a weird company to target in 2026. Back then…
Steve Jobs gave a famous speech at Stanford, where he told graduates that the only way to do great work is to love what you do, and that if you haven't found your passion yet, you should keep looking.
Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar. 1:1 — he's fine. Status meeting — listen. Staff me
Micropayment-powered stories
One thing I've learned about paradoxes: often the answer to the riddle of "how can this one thing have such a contradictory set of features and effects?" is "it's not one thing, it's two things*."
Why AI won't augment human capabilities much.
An American MEXT scholar shares the pros and cons of doing a PhD in Japan, from funding and part-time work to university life and career options.
I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.
Working on an international tech team comes with communication challenges that go beyond just language. Here’s some practical advice I’ve gathered in my ten years of working in Japan.
There are a lot of challenges in the way QA and engineering work together. Many eng leaders think you shouldn't have QA. I dig in.
Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome.
This week has been… eventful. And when I say eventful, I can say this has been the funniest pentest I have ever been on in my life. Let me tell you about it!
Tailscale's CEO talks about outages: what they are, why they happen, and how Tailscale is making them smaller and less frequent.
Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy.
A simple personal website and blog
Back in 2005, when I first joined the SUNY Buffalo CSE department, the department secretary was a wonderful lady named Joann, who was over 6...
