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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 602 posts.
Writing code is a part of being a software developer but often more important question is to figure what code to write and how and that I like to do away from computer with my notebook.
Every so often I come across a paper, blog post, or (occasionally) video that completely changes how I think about a topic in programming languages and compilers. For some of these posts, I can’t even remember how I thought about the idea before reading it—it was that impactful.
Painting weddings for a few years now, I have spent a fair bit of time observing strangers move through a room.
Grief gets an expiration date. Just like us.
cw: death dad died this summer, from his first heart attack, barely a week after his 57th birthday. i get the first call at 11:30pm from mom, who lived...
Great mentors help, but purposeful tinkering and grit tend to forge the strongest software engineers.
A client once responded to one of my questions by saying, "Oh Greg, I am too busy living to think about life!” His off-the-cuff comment named a trap al ...
In 2015 I got rid of everything I owned that didn’t fit in a laptop backpack, and I’ve been living at this level of minimalism since. The idea is to only own what I need, which allows me to focus more, spend less, travel spontaneously and simplify my life.
On selective agency in capable people
Programs Should Be Valid as They Are Typed
Unlike a lot of places in tech, my company, Set Studio/Piccalilli has no outside funding. Bootstrapped is what the LinkedIn people say, I think. It’s been a hard year this year. A very hard year. I think a naive person would blame it all on the seemingly industry-wide attitude of “AI can just do this […]
I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt - millions of lines of code, no unit tests, and products using l...
Well it happened. PG&E has dropped the facade of necessary rate increases because of system upgrades, and they have come out and said what…
One of the things I do when I'm feeling blue is to make a mental list of the nice things people have done for me over the years, including perfect strangers.
What was the key to successfully learning to drive, ride a bike, or speak a foreign language? Confidence, and it’s every bit as important in computing, and in macOS.
We are coming up on five years since the first M1 Macs shipped. It was an incredible time to be a Mac user. Those first Apple silicon Macs looked like the Intel machines they replaced, but they were better in every single way. In December 2020, John Gruber wrote: We knew this to be true: Computers could run fast and…
So many sci-fi movies, anime, and video games owe a massive debt of gratitude to William Gibson's seminal 1984 novel.
Living intentionally in a world of distraction.
Heads‑up: The concept of this post might seem trivial, but it can improve your career, happiness, and the people you care about. Proceed without caution. It only takes about 10 minutes to read.
The Books I Enjoyed Most in 2024
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2025. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
Some teams require that every TODO comment in a codebase gets logged in the bug tracker. Others automatically delete any “stale” TODO that has been in the codebase for over a year. Don’t do it!
The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry of dog breeds or a…
A real-world horror story about contracts, control, and the dark side of managed open source.
There's a bit more below, but I also wrote a follow-up 5 years after the illustrated guide which may be of interest -- HOWTO: Get tenure .
On the need for a world without us
A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.
A website supporting the books of author Simon Monk.
