The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers
System administration is in a sad state. It in a mess.
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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
System administration is in a sad state. It in a mess.
It might seem a reasonable question, but it makes some terrible assumptions: lines of code = effort lines of code = value all lines of c...
DEI statements are affirmations made when you’re applying for college admission, university jobs, or even science-society grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of “diver…
When I was going through YC, I didn’t mention my seven month old daughter to anyone. Now a few years later I have two kids, a dog and a very packed schedule. My kids are the best thing in my life. For years, my work was my life. Now my life competes with my work.
Curing Your AI 10x Engineer Imposter Syndrome
I learned to code in the Javascript stack [1] and am building a Javascript based product [2]. I never questioned this stack: many companies default to it, JS everywhere seems good, and the community is big. But for my new side project I decided to try Rails because despite some...
This post describes in detail how I support myself while working on the SerenityOS project.
I quit my job towards the end of last month. When I started this blog, I told myself, “Don’t talk about work.” Since my employment is in the rear view mirror, I’m going to b…
My name is Preston Thorpe, I'm 31 years old and I've spent just under 10 years of my life in Prison (all for non-violent drug crimes.) I am currently incarcerated at Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine. More importantly, far more importantly, I am a software developer, open source maintainer…
I'm burnt out. If you're reading this, there's a strong chance you're burnt out too. We're about to have, uh, a moment, so brace yourself.
2 weeks of dealing with Google as a developer
I was 30 seconds away from running malware, Here's how a sophisticated scam operation almost got me, and why every developer needs to read this.
We reward complexity and ignore simplicity. In interviews, design reviews, and promotions. Here’s how to fix it.
This is the story of how I found what I believe to be scientific misconduct and what happened when I reported it. Science is supposed to b...
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up...
It’s been a while since I was on the receiving end of a software engineering interview. But I still remember my favorite interview question. It was at MemSQL circa 2013. (They haven’t even kept their name, so I assume they’re not still relying on this specific interview question. I don’t feel bad for revealing it…
The manager’s pathI bought and read The Manager’s Path by the awesome Camille Fournier when it first came out. At the time, I was a senior Database Engineer aspiring to become a principal engineer ...
Thanks to a recruiting process that left a bad taste in my mouth, I refuse to accept any further interviews from large tech companies unless they are on my terms.
The hard part of writing software has never been the writing. It was building a working model of the domain in your head first. Before you could ship a payroll…
At Basecamp, we treat our company as a product. It's not a rigid thing that exists, it's a flexible, malleable idea that evolves. We aren't stuck with what we have, we can create what we want. Just as we improve products through iteration, we iterate on our company too. Recently, we've made some internal company…
My name is Maria. I happily identify as female. I work as an Agile Coach for a tech company in Cambridge, UK. I am not a woman in tech. I grew up in Pjedsted, a village in Denmark, with my mum and …
To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:
Software development topics I've changed my mind on over the course of a decade
I’ve always been pretty good at math. Not trigonometry, or arithmetic, or whatever people are usually thinking of when they’re like, “Oh, you must be smart! I hate math!” But, combinatorics and gra…
Westbrook spent 35 years in a codebase that allegedly powers some sort of medical software somewhere. During his tenure, he contributed hundreds of lines of code to his projects.