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"Programmer" is an Overgeneralization
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Donald Knuth Earlier today, I came across a post during...
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Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
3002
How to present backend demos
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
3003
Lessons Learned from Reading Post Mortems
I love reading postmortems. They're educational, but unlike most educational docs, they tell an entertaining story. I've spent a decent chunk of time reading postmortems at both Google and Microsoft. I haven't done any kind of formal analysis on the most common causes of bad failures (yet), but there are a handful of…
3004
The day I started believing in unit tests
Right after getting my degree, I was lucky to be hired into a small but decent R&D department as an embedded software engineer. My first task was to create a Unit Test project and have it run in our build pipeline after compilation. I was not particularly excited about this task, it seemed like busywork to me. I…
3005
Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed
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
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Autism and gender imbalance in tech
I’ve just seen two talks back to back. The first was about AI, where the now compulsory first question came from the audience ‘Why are the...
3008
How did I get so unhappy working in tech?
Click to read Mr. Chan's guide to substitute teaching, a Substack publication.
3009
Is Uncle Bob serious?
Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) thinks that defects in safety-critical systems are caused by a lack of developer professionalism. I think he's wrong.
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Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
And I was pretty damn good at my job too.
3012
The greatest resume I've ever seen
He had zero cloud experience ... or did he?
3013
Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership
This tension of what customers are asking for vs what customers really need shows up in areas like resilience. Amazon's "Well-Architected Framework" strongly exhorts customers to avoid building production workloads in a single Availability Zone — but Amazon's cross-AZ bandwidth pricing is painful, and Amazon doesn't…
3014
Software Engineering Insights from 10 Years at Google
Lessons learned from 10 years at Google
3015
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…
3016
Perfectionism – one of the biggest productivity killers in the eng industry
It can cause immense stress and can lead to burnout 🤯 Don't worry, we're sharing our mistakes, so hopefully you'll avoid some!
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Five years as a startup CTO: How, why, and was it worth it? (2024)
I can't believe it's been five years since my last post… Five years since I decided to join an early stage startup as the CTO / "the tech guy". Five years since I took my last train
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A Step Behind the Bleeding Edge: A Philosophy on AI in Dev
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…
3023
Invented here syndrome
An explanation of how I use an LLM to help me with Unity, do math quicker, and add Victorian flavour to the text.
3024
There is no “us” in team
I’ve talked before about the non-team team dynamic that is “one person per task”. Where the management and engineers collude to push the organisation beyond a sustainable pace by making sure that at all times, each individual is kept busy and collaboration is minimised. I talked about the deleterious effect on…
3025
Being on a board as an employee
I recently left my job at Honeycomb. They’re a fantastic company, and I think they will be wildly successful. Still, life circumstances are such that I wanted to explore an opportunity at a much larger technology organization. More on that in another post, perhaps. In this post, I want to reflect on a unique aspect of…
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There’s no glory in overworking, it’s just imminent burnout
it’s just imminent burnout.
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Zen and the Art of Software Maintenance
In one part of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is neither about Zen nor motorcycle maintenance, there are two motorcycles and two riders. John Sutherland is a romanticist who appreciates the external qualities of his motorcycle: its aesthetics, and its use as a vehicle. The narrator is a…
3030
Tiers of answers to half-baked questions
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus