Topics /
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 302 posts.
I often struggle to explain what it means to be part of a high-functioning software team. Sure, there are mountains of literature, and an entire genre of LinkedIn thought leadership that professes all kinds of guidelines and heuristics about what makes teams work, but in my experience, it’s hard to internalize these…
Inspired by Jan Stette's "Things I Believe" post, I decided to write down some of the more contentious beliefs I have about software engineering. I've selected some of my more extreme opinions here, so I expect reasonable people to disagree with me. That's ok.
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
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…
As an immigrant on an H1B, you have exactly 60 days to find a new job when you are laid-off. This is a very short window of time to explore and land any job, let alone a job that matches your skills and interests. I found myself in this situation along with many others when Uber announced layoffs earlier this year…
1. Statistics / numerical analysis / data science is a lot harder than you, the reader of this blog, might think.
Know when it's time to break up with your customers.
The news is out : I left France, I'm no longer a professor at EURECOM, I joined the Malware Research Team at CISCO Talos, and I moved to beautiful Vienna. Big change :-)
I was incredibly lucky to spend 5 amazing years at Heroku. By the end of my time, I was operating in a Staff capacity, although I’m honestly completely uncle...
From XKCD, released under the Creative Commons 2.5 License An app contributed to chaos at last week's 2020 Democratic Iowa Caucus. Hours after the caucus opened, it became obvious that something had gone wrong. No results had been reported yet. Reports surfaced that described technical problems and inconsistencies…
What does it look like to be obsessed with success and prestige? Imagine a guy who starts many endeavors and side projects just because he wants to be known as the creator of something. Or someone who builds another social app, not because he has an unique problem that's unaddressed, but because he wants to be the…
This post is an excerpt from my 2020 software developer pay analysis . Read the rest of the analysis here .
OS X is retired, but fortunately, its legacy appears to live on in macOS 11.0.
Have you ever thought to find your next job in an HTTP header? cURL can reveal this and many more secrets.
I was tricked into thinking I had tons of grit as a student. I worked hard in school. I put in long hours. I stayed up all night reading and preparing for debate topics, doing homework, writing essays. It was easy for me to burn the midnight oil. I enjoy
We’ve all seen them. They drive the rest of the team crazy. How can we use them to our advantage?
This week marks my one-year anniversary of quitting my full-time job and becoming a freelance AI engineer. I’m writing down my thoughts and experience here so that this might be useful if you are even vaguely interested.
If you are an average 30 yr old engineer, let's say you want to retire reasonably by the time you are 60. A year wasted at a poor job or role is equivalent to you throwing away 3.3% of your career. The older you get, the steeper your loss is.
My name is Nikolay. I’m a web developer from Moscow, Russia. My hobby is writing Open Source libraries (libphonenumber-js…
Boy, when your I’m-outta-here essay goes viral, do you ever get a lot of input. A few responses came up often enough to be worth sharing. This was via email, Twitter DMs, blog comments, and LinkedIn messages. All of which went completely batshit.
Extending on the about page, I want to emphasise even more the importance of creating personal projects, having independent work and going far beyond what a degree might teach you. Just so that we are on the same page, I will not take into consideration the reason for choosing a Computer Science degree, nor the money…
