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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
I regularly receive e-mail from people who want advice on how to learn more about computer security, either as a course of study in college or as an IT person considering it as a career choice. First, know that there are many subspecialties in computer security. You can be an expert in keeping systems from being…
Most of my clients are CEOs of growing companies, most of the rest are C-level executives in similar settings, and a number of others are leaders in investment or professional services firms. In order to be effective in these roles they must be able to influence others, wield authority, and maintain status. At the…
Not long ago, I wrote a post about that one, “top” software engineer role that companies don’t hire directly into. I’m going to pick up where I left off there. For a quick recap, recall the diagram I made (and my wife kindly GIF-ified for me). In red, you have the positions that a company...
An interface can be thought of as a contract between the system and the environment. In a computer program, the 'system' is the function or module in question, and the 'environment' is the rest of the project. The interface formally describes what can pass between the system and the environment. An 'implementation'…
Since it’s application season again, I thought that I would share some things that you are ‘allowed’ to do in academia but may not be aware of. This post is inspired by Milan Cvitkovic’s post on ‘Things you’re allowed to do’ and Veronika Cheplygina’s posts on advice for Ph.D. students, in particular her post ‘7 things…
Dear (insert name here), I heard you enjoy a certain programming language named Python. Programming is a wonderful activity. I am a little...
Should I teach myself to code or get a college CS degree? This is a question that many face. Software development is a field that is heavily reliant on skills. So surely teaching yourself to code should be enough right? Wrong.
Follow these steps to start an LLC in California
We don’t really talk about layoffs. When you hear someone say they got laid off, it’s likely the next thing you hear from them is about the new job they’re starting. But we don’t talk about what it’s like in between those two events - which means we’re not acknowledging how traumatic it is to be laid off.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
There is a popular movement on Choosing Boring Technology started by article by Dan McKinley, followed by some discussions on Hacker News…
A brief exchange with a Facebook recruiter in the summer of 2020
A guide to effective pair-programming
Too often we see job requirements for development positions with a long series of bullet points: General Tech X everyone has heard about, 5 years Specific Tech Y that came out last year, 3 years Sp…
In September 2021, online coding school Treehouse laid off close to 90% of its staff without severance pay.
This is a guest blog post from Brooke Kuhlmann. Enjoy. Dear developer, Of the many techniques you’ll pick up over the course of your career, one worth investing in early is journaling. Journa…
If you were making a list of things that could go wrong on an seed, angel, or Series A investment, you would have to put the co-founder relationship right up there at the top of the list. Not every startup has co-founders. Some just have one founder. In some ways, that is a bit easier […]
Even though the impacts of LLMs have never been seen before, they feel familiar to earlier assumptions.
Working remotely is a mixed bag. There are a lot of positives... and some negatives. If you’re a remote employee (or considering a remote job), here are my top ten tips that I’ve gleaned in the last six months.
Dear new developer, I ran across this tweet a while ago: If there was only one piece of advice that I wish I had known early in my career as a software dev is that understanding people is more impo…
