Success, and Farming vs. Mining
Let’s come up with an analogy and then torture it like we’re the Cheney administration: imagine you’ve just purchased a plot of land. What a...
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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
Let’s come up with an analogy and then torture it like we’re the Cheney administration: imagine you’ve just purchased a plot of land. What a...
My grandpa -- my Missouri grandpa, who played slide guitar to me when I got homesick on the rare occasions I stayed with them -- grew up on a farm without electricity. He went past eighth grade, which really mattered to him. He loved that I played harp, which he always called "elegant," in an extremely Missouri…
Soft skills play an important role for programmers, listening to clients’ requirements, creating solutions, and communicating effectively can make or break a career.
The reasons for this, are quite irrelevant to this article, but in short, the investor backed out and the ongoing development of a product I was mainly involved in, had been suspended.
Before we launched HelloSign, I remember showing HelloFax to a family member. This person was normally supportive, but he took a glance and walked away. He wasn't the only one. A lot of people...
Coming on Stage for my Set. From March to April 2022 I took part in a 6 week stand-up comedy course for beginners at The Comedy St...
For the first time since Fog Creek Software was founded more than sixteen years ago, we have a new CEO, Anil Dash.
The following is my response to Ewan Valentine’s blog post “How to never complete anything” that I discovered on Hacker News. Once again, I ask for people’s indulgence for posting a reply on my own blog rather than in the Hacker News comments. I find writing on my own blog a bit easier than wading […]
On being a faulty cog in a machine when the machine itself is faulty
The story of one programmer’s journey into, and vehement rejection of, this thing we call “DevOps” – lessons learned, sound advice and why you’re probably doing it all…
[Content Warning: parts of this post could be triggering for those who have experienced gaslighting or other forms of abuse]
There was a Simpsons episode, I can’t recall correctly, but I think Bart recorded Lisa when her heart broke and he watched it in slow motion to stop exactly at that point. I thought of this e…
As an investor, I've found that one of the reasons there are fewer female startup founders than male ones is that there are fewer female programmers. So this summer I'm trying an experiment to see...
New Post: ADTs in TLA+ Using Abstract Data Types in TLA+. It's an adaptation of part of my TLAConf talk. It's also a lot more advanced than most of the...
Is something I think about often because I can’t help but wonder if most other jobs are like this.
It will take about three minutes to read this column. Whether it’s worth three minutes depends on me, of course. I will do my best. But it also depends on you, on your attitude to time and, perhaps…
Last weekend I attended the MHacks: Refactor hackathon on behalf of my company. I acted as a representative of my company as well as a mentor for the hackers...
Companies are willing to lay off employees despite being profitable.
Sometimes people choose to work for one company over another for reasons related to the work environment, for example what the company does, and whether the other employees create a place that's pleasant to work at. But a major factor is compensation. If Company A and Company B are largely comparable, but Company A…
A guide to scaling product & engineering teams from $0 to past $100M ARR
In which I provide you with hundreds of dollars worth of software consulting, for free, in a single blog post.
Some bugs look so impossible you start blaming the OS, the tools, or the compiler. This post digs into three of them.