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Business questions worth asking
This is a list of questions I’ve collected over the years that resonate with my business and product philosophies. Most are not original and were collected from or inspired by various books…
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Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 321 posts.
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The work is never just “the work” (2022)
A deep dive on why projects always take longer and a framework to improve future estimation
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I got paid to live in Antarctica
Sharing how I got paid to live in Antarctica, how to get a job on the ice, and everything you need to know about life at McMurdo Station.
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Shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it
As I watched him on stage, I thought about what made him extraordinary. It’s not his voice. He readily admits that his voice isn’t amazing.
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Tragedy of return to hostile offices
Don't suffer and merely survive, aided by your noise cancelling headphones. Optimising for individual happiness can result in less of the joy that people find in teams that achieve great things together.
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Working for a Dating Website (2015)
Over this past weekend, I came across a Wired called "Write the Perfect Email to Anyone with this Creepy Site" on using machine learning and natural language processing to analyze a person's social media profiles and offer tips on how to communicate with them effectively. Most people immediately thought about sales…
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The Bluffers Guide to the Mythical Man Month
One thing that often strikes me when sitting in on client interviews is how many candidates lack an historical perspective on software development. In a profession of “perpetual beginnersR…
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Broken Ownership
In the ownership trio, we discussed 3 elements: Knowledge, Mandate and Responsibility. This article digs into various broken ownership scenarios where 1-2 of those elements are missing, what are the common symptoms and how to fix them.
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What I have changed my mind about in software development
I really like this quote from Jeff Bezos: “Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.” Lately I have been thinking about wha…
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The time I accidentally spent a year combatting fraud
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time enjoying the Darknet Diaries podcast and it’s compelled me to finally share the story of the most intense year of my
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How to prioritize tasks?
Shipping products is hard. What makes it hard is that typical products involve multiple teams and multiple dependencies. Navigating these challenges is non-trivial. There are technical challenges to overcome, but those are typically not the biggest blockers. (There are enough smart people in the room to take care of…
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Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
Then Life Continued
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Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?
This week we’re going to take a detour into understanding the structure of academia, in particular the different kinds of ‘professors’ and their academic ranks in the American sys…
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How I feel quitting my own startup
I left my own startup after almost 5 years of hard work. It was a tough decision, but a necessary one.
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Personal relations as a manager
I was reminded by a discussion with a friend why, as a manager, you should be cautious about the relations you develop with the people in your team.
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The joys of maintenance programming (2011)
In the old days when I started programming, green programmers trying to build their skills and get experience started out doing maintenance programming. Only the old hands got to write new code. The newbies cut their teeth debugging and fixing musty old code that still worked for the business. I’ve done my share of…
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I've mostly stopped reading technical mailing lists
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Waterloo Style
A blog about software development and programming.
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Don't write clean code, write CRISP code
“Clean code” is so over: all the cool kids are switching to CRISP code . I’ll show you how to achieve it in five catchy, T-shirt-friendly slogans.
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How to reduce stress and overcome anxiety as a software developer
I share my story about stress and anxiety and how I managed to overcome it. I also share practical tips and resources that will help you begin your healing journey today!
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Understanding people matters more than understanding tech
Dear new developer, I ran across this tweet a while ago: If there was only one piece of advice that I wish I had known early in my career as a software dev is that understanding people is more impo…
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The day I started believing in unit tests
Right after getting my degree, I was lucky to be hired into a small but decent R&D department as an embedded software engineer. My first task was to create a Unit Test project and have it run in our build pipeline after compilation. I was not particularly excited about this task, it seemed like busywork to me. I…
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Lessons Learned from the Book “Effective Remote Work”
Lessons Learned from the Book Effective Remote Work by James Stanier
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Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting
The new normal in tech recruiting
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Problems that attract smart people
The roller-coaster that is generative AI keeps chugging on, and for those of us sitting in the audience, it is more than entertaining.