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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 264 posts.
Whether it's building a new project from scratch, implementing a big feature, or beginning a large refactor, it can be difficult to stay motivated and complete large technical projects. A method that works really well for me is to continuously see real results and to order my work based on that.
I haven't published since April because I've been afraid. What was I afraid of? In this post I detail every single thing I've avoided admitting on this blog.
In 2011, Larry Page became CEO of Google and tried to fix meetings. But his new policies were no match for Google Calendar pedants.
A calm guide to networking as an introvert—learn how posture, presence, and small signals can help you connect meaningfully without faking extroversion.
How to use AI coding assistants without letting your hard-earned engineering skills wither away.
From chronically sore to chronically curious about the mind 🧠
I didn't misclick any buttons. My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.
In Engineering, quarterly OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) can feel like a duplication of product planning. Basically, they say “Ship the Roadmap.” What new information are they comm…
Part 7 of my software journey, getting to know developer experience.
...and the vibes are definitely off It feels different in tech right now. We’re coming off a long era where optimism carried the industry. Something has curdled. AI hype, return-to-office mandates, and continued layoffs have shifted the mood. Managers are quicker to fire, existential dread has replaced
The complete guide to salary negotiation for engineers and other professionals who think negotiating is morally questionable.
I had a wonderful job, until I didn’t. This is about what happened—and what is still happening.
“Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘How’.” ― Viktor Frankl quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Man’s Search for Meaning Let me guess: Viktor Frankl calls this feeling the “existential vacuum” in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust, and in this…
Many software engineers are fatalistic about company politics. They believe that it’s pointless to get involved, because: Technical decisions are often made for…
What’s odd about you is what’s interesting.
How high is the stress I am talking about? You are commuting all you think is that you might snap today, you might quit today. That is what I am calling a hi...
The qualities you value most in engineers are also creating your biggest problems. Here’s how to handle this paradox.
I was hired on at Apple in October of 1995. This was what I refer to as Apple’s circling the drain period. Maybe you remember all the doomsaying — speculation that Apple was going to be shuttering soon. It’s a little odd perhaps then that they were hiring at all but apparently Apple reasoned that they nonetheless…
The people who create software generally refer to themselves as software engineers, and yet if they graduate from university, it is typically with a degree in computer science. That has always felt a little strange to me, because science and engineering are two pretty different disciplines – yet ...
How tech companies make money and why it's important
After joining Mintlify (which acquired my previous company), I finally fixed a search bug that had bothered me for over a year as a user - the debounced search queries weren't being aborted, causing race conditions and poaor search quality. By adding an AbortController to ensure only the most recent search query…
The initial, feverish enthusiasm for large language models (LLMs) is beginning to cool, and for good reason. It’s time to trade the out-of-control hype for a more pragmatic, even “boring,” approach. A recent MIT report shows that 95% of companies implementing this technology have yet to see a positive outcome. It’s…
What does it mean to get things done? In the abstract, you can complete a mathematical proof or a problem set, but the real world is much fuzzier. Suppose I…
Learning in public helps me grow as an engineer and seems to benefit others too. Here's why I should do more.
Frivilous dependencies are the enemy of maintainability.
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” — Leonard Cohen Let me tell you something that will happen after you become a manager: you’re going to mess u…
Yesterday, the tj-actions repository, a popular tool used with Github Actions was compromised (for more background read one of these two articles). Watching the infrastructure and security engineering teams at Carta respond, it highlighted to me just how much LLMs can’t meaningfully replace many essential roles of…
This is why recognizing whether a system is complicated or complex is so important: it shapes how we should approach problem-solving.
