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The future of software engineering is SRE
When code gets cheap operational excellence wins. Anyone can build a greenfield demo, but it takes engineering to run a service.
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 259 posts.
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Goodbye Google
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
A short write-up on my experience completing a Computer Science BSc from my bedroom.
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20 years on AWS and never not my job
While I created my AWS account because I was interested in Amazon S3, that was not in fact immediately available to me: In the early days of AWS, you had to specifically ask for each new service to be enabled for your account. My new AWS account did come with two services enabled by default, though — Amazon Simple…
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A Programmer's Loss of Identity
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me . In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be…
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Stories from 25 Years of Software Development
Last year, I completed 20 years in professional software development. I wanted to write a post to mark the occasion back then, but couldn't find the time. This post is my attempt to make up for that omission. In fact, I have been involved in software development for a little longer than 20 years. Although I had my…
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Successful companies go blind
The Mexican cavefish kept its eye genes for over a million years after the eyes themselves disappeared. Something similar happens to companies once they achieve success.
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Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
Thomas Dullien’s guide to software and SaaS B2B entrepreneurship.
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The reverts will continue until morale improves
Many readers will be aware that an unusually high number of features have been reverted from the PostgreSQL 19 branch after the beta period began. Having some reverts is not unusual, maybe one per cycle could be expected. But this time around, about 8 to 10 significant features, depending on how you count, have been…
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I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)
By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
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Job Postings for Software Engineers Are Rapidly Rising
Citadel Securities is an award-winning global market-maker across a broad array of fixed income and equity products.
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Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
The bottleneck has shifted from implementation to specification.
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Three important steps in my maturation process
My father passed recently, and he was twice my age. I am approximately the same age that he was when I was born, and I am now “the old generation” - there’s no one left in the generation above me.
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It's not empowering to hand off the details
I think behind a lot of the enthusiasm around AI is a dream of being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details.
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We might all be AI engineers now
The models are good now. But most people still miss the point.
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What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
A week ago, I wrote about how Generative and Agentic AI may be amplifying what I’ve been calling cognitive debt: the accumulated gap between a system’s evolving structure and a team’s shared unders...
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Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams
Paper: This blog post has been expanded into a full paper: Scalable and Personalized Oral Assessments Using Voice AI (Panos Ipeirotis and...
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Dumb ways for an open source project to die
How your dependencies became Bernies
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Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents like a medical team
How Cockroach Labs built MOLT Sinai, an AI coding “teaching hospital” that shipped IBM Db2 migration support in under two days.
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Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft
I started a reading group in 2021, a few months after joining Microsoft as a new grad on the Azure Databases team. The group was initially focused on database internals, which was my favorite subject at UW. Databases touch so many areas of CS: compiler construction in the query engine, memory management with the…
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Doing Everyone Else's Job
I find it very useful to be able to do everyone else’s job — it helps you learn how they work and what they need, and it helps even more when you need their job done, but they won’t do it themselves.
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Simulacrum of Knowledge Work
How do you know the output is good without redoing the work yourself? You've received a report, a market analysis for the new product you're planning to l...
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Halt and Catch Fire
I have never watched the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire, and for a long time I only knew the title, but nothing about the show. Something about it always reminded...
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Are two heads better than one?
A look at the surprising probabilities behind a simple coin flipping game