Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 300 posts.

Career & Management
2024
211

On Being a Senior Engineer (2012)

I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that…

224

What Is a Staff Engineer?

"I've worked with a couple of Staff Engineers on different teams in the past and I've seen them do different things, but I've not been able to pin down exactly what they do." I get this question quite frequently. Sometimes from engineers looking to elevate their roles.

230

Software Friction

In his book On War, Clausewitz defines friction as the difference between military theory and reality: Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which…

237

Take the Road Most Documented

How great would it be if the solution to most errors you face were in the first place you looked? That’s what the Arch Wiki has been for me: a massive wealth of information and troubleshooting resources to help me navigate the various configuration and installation issues I’ve encountered. Some people claim Arch Linux…