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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 6,085 posts.
I’ve spent nearly twenty years blogging, giving talks and releasing open source code. It’s been fantastic for my career, and a huge amount of work. But here’s a useful secret: …
Sometimes you see a headline or a Youtube video “How I got into tech without a C.S.
How does a good developer become a great developer?
Last week, I received the following invitation to a compulsory on-site meeting, following management's repeated engagements with some sort of Agile shaman.
The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change is written by Tanya Reilly and published on October 25, 2022, by O’Reilly Media. Favorite Quotes Early in your career, if you do a great job on something that turns out to be unnecessary, you’ve still done a great job. At the…
The news is out : I left France, I'm no longer a professor at EURECOM, I joined the Malware Research Team at CISCO Talos, and I moved to beautiful Vienna. Big change :-)
You've raised a new funding round. You need to staff up. Here's what that looks like.
Belts in Karate are ordered from white to black. This is of course a new invention. Originally, new colored belts were not given upon arbitrary levels of attainment, a white belt was given at the beginning of one's training and you just never washed it. Over the years...
Following your passion is the worst career advice you can get. Cal Newport argues for a more effective alternative.
Whether it's building a new project from scratch, implementing a big feature, or beginning a large refactor, it can be difficult to stay motivated and complete large technical projects. A method that works really well for me is to continuously see real results and to order my work based on that.
I was pacing around my apartment at 2 a.m., palms sweaty, convinced the production database had already gone up in flames. It hadn’t, of course, but my
July 2009 One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more. There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional…
Several tech companies face a fresh problem after cutting jobs: their rating on Glassdoor nosedives. But there’s a way they manage to fix this. I show what companies are doing - and why.
The book starts with a story about a time Margaret Hamilton brought her young daughter with her to NASA, back in the days of the Apollo program. During a simulation mission, her daughter caused the mission to crash by pressing some keys that caused a prelaunch program to run during the simulated mission. Hamilton…
On automation, identity, and why warmth and presence — not technical skill — are the parts of a person that can never be replaced by a model.
Update 2019: This article got 183 comments on Reddit, and 237 comments on Hacker News. Many commenters said it couldn’t be done — they…
Kaikki nettikasinot and other similar projects can be exhausting, due to their demanding schedules. How do I organize myself? Learn now!
(Spoiler: trusting your contributors works) Some years ago, I polished up and released an abandoned project for storing financial data in Django. It let you declare “Money” fields on your models, dealing with proper storage and currencies for you. My use case for the library, django-money eventually faded, but it…
Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement , to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation in traditionally remunerative fields like law, consulting, etc. In software, "senior" dev salary at a high-paying tech company is…
I’m taking some time away from comma. In some ways, I feel like it’s all planned out, it only remains to see if it works or not. I rewatched my first Lex Fridman and realized I hadn’t said much new on the self driving front for the past couple years. My two part blog post from 2019 remains a true description of the…
How did you start your day today? Probably reached for the phone. Turned off the alarm. Glanced at the time. Scrolled through the Slack...
The personal website of Christopher Laing.
A how-to manual for engineer-led discovery in software platforms
For the first time ever, I was laid off, and had to find a new software developer job. I managed to find a new one, but it took longer than I thought, and it was a lot of work. I was in contact wit…
Cybersecurity isn’t just a priority for Kraken, it’s part of our origin story and embedded into our DNA.
Two modes of operation leverage entirely different practices
