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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 331 posts.
One of the watershed moments of my life was as a 20 year old intern attending a workplace presentation about personal finance. Over the course of one hour, I learnt about the power of buy-and-hold …
My code doesn't compile. Why? The number of times in my career I have been asked a variation on "why doesn't my application work" is shocking. When you meet up with Operations people for drinks, you'll hear endless variations on it. Application teams attempting to assign ownership
"Luck Surface Area" is a turn of phrase that popped out my mouth during a discussion episode of TechZing a few months back and is something I've been meaning to write about ever since but never got around to actually doing. However, thanks to Lance Jones who referenced the concept in a recent blog post I have finally…
Back in 2007, I was searching for a software developer job at various companies. At one of these companies, the best strategy to get the job was to give a wrong answer. If this seems weird to you, let me explain what happened.
Coronavirus gain-of-function research comes from playing the "Science Game"
When we find ourselves in endless debates where everyone defends their idea, we don't know how to handle the situation. We eventually find a way out, but what we need is an excellent system.
Building effective organisations is a remarkably useful, if rare, skill. This is what it looks like, what it consists of, and how to tell if someone has it.
Networking is painful, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to enjoy it. Unfortunately for me, networking is effective.
I made a simple project which got spread in various tech communities and social media. Github featured it in 'Trending repositories of day' section
What software developers can learn from Ford and GM
This weekend I was talking with a friend about how I'd planned and estimated a huge software project in one of my previous jobs. By that I mean not something which can be done by a single team in a sprint or two, but something which requires several teams, across several quarters of effort, involving many other…
A common topic of discussion among my close friends is where the bottlenecks are in our productivity and how we can execute more quickly. This is very different from what I see in my extended social circles, where people commonly say that velocity doesn't matter . In online discussions about this, I frequently see…
Reflections from my time at Google Brain, and why I left for a PhD.
I will die on this hill.
My housemate the other day asked me something to the effect of “How can Software Engineers call themselves engineers when there’s no rules, governing bodies, or anything to stipulate what true Software Engineering is?”
I had to confront a lot of my fears about myself, sometimes every day. I had to learn to show someone else all the things I didn’t know, my limitations as a human and a software engineer.
Ah yes, the fundamentals or endless list of things that everybody working in the field ought to know. Atomicity, something, something, Durability? To avoid any future embarrassments I made sure to dust off my Wild Hog book 1 and re-read the section on ACID. Here’s an excerpt directly from the book:
Software engineer, etc etc
“Who are you and why are you here?” –Dave Cutler (DaveC)
Let’s say my goal this year is to get to 10k monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
