Don't Give Your Users Shit Work
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
This is a story of how a software company was able to start a conversation with 8x more of their users by cutting the length of their emails by 90%. You could set up a test of this method in less than an hour. The Problem One of the most
I dropped out of school when I was 16 years old. School was not for me. To me, computers were so much more interesting. Right or wrong, I felt like I wasted my time there and my real education was starting when I came home. I lost respect for the institution and of course this meant that I no longer bothered to put any
Via LinkedIn, I learned about an article called “The age of Agile must end” by Michael Burnett, and I’ve since seen it pop up again in…
There’s a right and wrong way to proceed. Here’s how to increase the chances your leader listens and takes action--while reducing the chance they feel threatened.
Every couple of years somebody notices that large tech companies sometimes produce surprisingly sloppy code. If you haven’t worked at a big company, it might be…
I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work , but most people I talk to don't see anything like this . For a long time, I thought this had something to do with how I use computers but, over time, I've realized that…
Rantings of an Entrepreneur
Last year I did a year in review post, so by doing it again this year I am turning it into a tradition. This is more for me (to see my own progress) than it is for you, but I hope you can learn something as well. If you want to read last years you […]
Writing serves as a foundation for clarity in thought. It can help you engage more deeply with your ideas.
A personal comparison of battery life between my MacBook M1 Pro and Framework 13
In 1985, I was a freshman at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. The college had a VAX 11/780 running 4.2BSD and a PDP-11/70 running v7 with some Berkeley and local code hacked in. It was my first exper…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Two days at PDX DevOpsDays, a gathering of system administrators who use version control, and write a lot of YAML.
Finding diamonds in the rough
Why GitHub Actions is the Internet Explorer of CI, and why Buildkite offers a better path forward for teams that care about developer experience.
Recently the team I work with completed a project to allow Shopify to run in multiple datacenters . This project was a refactoring project in disguise. When you undertake large refactoring of a code-base with 100s of developers and 100,000s of lines of code, you can’t align by sending an email. The merge-conflicts a…
I decided to build an extension for VSCode. That would add handy buttons for many common commands like save file, format file, show opened files etc.