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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 190 posts.
You only get 1,000 lines of code a week
Choose to do only the things that nobody else can do.
OS X 10.9.3 Is Toxic
OS X 10.9.3 Recurring Panics
I Quit My Job To Teach People About Hardware
This topic was discussed in greater detail in Episode 184 of to The Amp Hour. This article is more about the personal feelings that have accompanied this (ongo
Last Minute Advice for YC Applicants
In 2009 I wrote a blog post here about advice for startups applying for YC. Little did I know years later I'd become a partner at Y Combinator and have the chance to shape hundreds of new startups...
Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist
People often ask me if I’m a talent agent for engineers, in the same way that actors have talent agents in Hollywood. In a lot of ways, the way I work is closer to a talent agent than a traditional recruiter — rather than sourcing for specific positions, I try to find smart people first, […]
A beginner's guide to funemployment
I recently stopped working for 5 months, and aside from writing a few blog posts and getting to Gold League in Starcraft, I achieved very little. It was wonderful.
Sacrificial Architecture
Sometimes it's a good thing to be writing code that you expect to throw away in a couple of years time.
Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
We learned recently of the suicide of Stefan Grimm, a successful professor at the prestigious Imperial College in London. Professors Grimm regularly published highly cited articles in the best journals. He was highly productive. Unfortunately, some of his colleagues felt that he did not secure sufficiently large…
Becoming A Software Consultant: My Backstory
1337 h4x0r
No, I’ll tell you the answer
Beware of advice that tries to change who you are. True wisdom guides you to a better version of yourself.
I Am an Indie iOS Developer – Part 2
I develop apps for iOS
A Day of Communication at GitHub
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
My journey into the Berlin startup scene
Six years as Heroku’s CTO was the greatest professional experience of my life. But what’s next?
The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I Work So Much
Academics constantly complain about being overworked, yet they also praise their freedom to decide how and when to work as one of the great ...
Great Programmers (2004)
I've seen a lot of discussion of great programmers, usually centering on how to find them, but usually what people really want to know is how to become one. Since I'm widely considered to be a great programmer, I'll give some advice. First of all there's raw coding ability. For this, practice makes…
The value of an engineering degree
Six years ago, in the summer of 2008, NYU and Polytechnic University came together to create NYU Poly, NYU’s engineering school in downtown Brooklyn. When I saw the news, I called NYU President John Sexton and asked for a meeting. He agreed and I went down to Washington Square to meet with him. I told […]
Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
I want to discuss why programming and coding are not the same, and why I can no longer support the Learn to Code movement. I can no longer tell my friends to learn coding. Although I’m passionate about it, it’s too arcane and insular for mainstream practice.
Stranger in a Strange Land: “Big Data” programmer meets HPC community
I attended the SIAM PP 2014 conference this week, because I'm developing an interest in MPI-style parallel algorithms (also, it was close b...
Why I Left the .NET Framework
The .NET Framework was good. Really good. Until it wasn’t. Why did I leave .NET? In short, it constrained our ability to choose (which is a huge deal for