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Tell, don't ask
And now, a friendly message from your local Tell, don’t ask Department. ...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,087 posts.
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You Don’t Need Permission
I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Suresh, an ex-student I’ve known for a long time. A U.S. citizen he was now the head of sales and marketing for a company in London selling medical devices t…
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The little legacy code that could: a fable of software ownership
Learn about ownership of legacy software code.
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Becoming the person who does the thing
Bad news: your internal identity dictates everything you do. Good news: you can change it
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Google IT Support Professional Certificate
The IT Support Professional Certificate program on Coursera helps prepare people for roles in IT support.
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Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
Listen now | "I was shocked with how intense, painstaking, and effective his learning process was"
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Omarchy Is Out
My latest love letter to Linux has been published. It's called Omarchy, and it's an opinionated setup of the Arch Linux distribution and the Hyprland tiling window manager. With everything configured out-of-the-box to give you exactly the same setup that I now run every day. My Platonic ideal of what a developer…
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Software Development Waste
I've looked back at the end of every software project I've ever been on and thought, "If I'd known then what I know now, I'd have been done in half the time." Despite this, I've never thought carefully about exactly where all the time went and why so much of it felt wasted.
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If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?
This is a transcript of my keynote presentation for the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo conference on January 8th, 2025. Watch the video here.
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Interview with Jeff Geerling
Andrew Gregory of HackSpace magazine sat down with the one and only Jeff Geerling to chat about the wholesome corner of the internet he created.
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Doing Everyone Else's Job
I find it very useful to be able to do everyone else’s job — it helps you learn how they work and what they need, and it helps even more when you need their job done, but they won’t do it themselves.
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A good developer has a natural, almost visceral aversion to complexity
Code should be simple. Code should be butt simple. Code should be so simple that there’s no way it can be misunderstood. Good code has no nooks. Good code has no crannies. Good code is a round room with no corners for bugs to hide in. We all know this. So why does most code suck? Because it’s written
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There are no adults in the room
Dear new developer, One of the most shocking things I learned when I started working in a professional capacity is that there are no adults in the room. That is not to denigrate everyone at your co…
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Agile: 5 years later and you're still doing it wrong
Which values of the Agile Manifesto do you find foolish? If you're going to tar and feather it(Agile), maybe you should start at the source.
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Serving 250k developers with one support engineer
Automation is a key part of every org in our company, including Support. It’s how we’re building the infrastructure company that we’ve always wanted.
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Donating my time to grow a VC-funded company: why I quit mentoring at Plato
tl;dr Nonprofit/pro bono organizations I suggest for offering mentoring/seeking mentorship: Mentoring Club [https://www.mentoring-club.com/the-mentors/category/software-engineering] (experienced mentors, EU focus), Coding Coach [https://codingcoach.io/] (aimed at software engineers), Mentors in Tech…
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Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice
This is a (very late) reply to Patrick McKenzie's " Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice ". I find much of his advice very sensible, and it might be very helpful to someone in the beginning of their career – assuming they can act upon it (and I really don't know whether my 20-year-old self could…
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The Code Review Pyramid (2022)
Table of Contents FAQ When it comes to code reviews, it’s a common phenomenon that there is much focus and long-winded discussions around mundane aspects like code formatting and style, whereas …