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The silent death of good code
I’ve been passionate about writing “Good Code™” since before I started my career, beginning way back when I was still a kid in middle school.
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
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Software Design Principles I Learned the Hard Way
If there’s two sources of truth, one is probably wrong. And yes, please repeat yourself.
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The burden of an Open Source maintainer
Or: Why can't you just merge my ten-line PR already? I maintain over 200 open source projects. Apparently (this is news to me) I am ranked in the top 200 GitHub users by followers, and there are 18,000 forks and 42,000 stars across my repos. On an average day, I see between 50-100 emails across my repositories for…
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Why Most Software Engineers Lose Nothing by Unionizing
Should software engineers unionize? I can’t give a simple answer to this. There are advantages and disadvantages to enrolling in a collective bargaining arrangement. If the disadvantages didn…
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Don't compare yourself to other entrepreneurs
Everyone says don't compare yourself to other people. It can be easier said than done. I'm going to run through how I avoid comparing myself
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Abuse prevention is tradecraft
It’s sunday evening; there’s a lot to be said for being a stay-at-home-dad, and honestly I actually like having stuff like meal-prep and laundry to do, after 35+ years of “All Uni…
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What Microsoft gets for $2 billion
As a follow up to my post on Microsoft and Creative Destruction, it’s worth looking at this chart (from Silicon Alley Insider). It shows the quarterly operating expenses for Microsoft’s…
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Where Yegge’s Wrong
Recently, Steve Yegge published two rants, each of which has gone viral and moved the Internet conversation needle a bit. I liked both of them, thought they were generally well-argued and useful. Unfortunately, there are a few assertions of fact there that are just wrong, and may be damaging. So I thought that, first…
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How to build trust as a new engineering manager
New managers often want to get everything right from the get-go. But, ironically, that would be their first mistake. Why? Because that's the total opposite of authenticity.
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Three sins of authors in computer science and math (1997)
Most of us learn how to write technical articles by osmosis. After reading a hundred or so papers, we unconsciously pick up the common patterns of the field and begin to imitate them. This phenomenon is largely beneficial, but there are several truly odious habits that are almost universally and inadvertently adopted…
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PM and EM Rules of Engagement
A guiding framework for how EMs + PMs should partner together.
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Stroustrup's Rule (2024)
Beginners need explicit syntax, experts want terse syntax.
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From Here On Out, Do What You Love
Thoughts & insights from the team behind Briggsby.
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Some perspective on a destroyed career
Someone over on Hacker news posted a link to a comp.lang.lisp post that I wrote three years ago that's generating a lot of discussion. I f...