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The Founder's Lie About Comfort Zones
There is a lot of talk going on about the endurance and struggle that startup founders go through. How long the hours are, we all...
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A Design Primer for Engineers
For a word that can so vastly change the fortunes of a company, it's worth noting that no generally accepted definition of the word design exists. This means wh
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Lean into the pain
When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you…
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Never Stop Hacking
A short note to myself: what makes programming fun isn't finishing tasks, it's the problems themselves and the process of learning. Never stop hacking.
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A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students
Planning to be an Intern in the Bay Area during Summer 2012? Make sure to read an Intern's Guide to the Bay Area, and join the 2012 Facebook group. (via this guy, via this guy)Joel Spolsky, from the Joel On Software blog and StackOverflow, wrote an article with Advice for Computer Science College Students back in '05…
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How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
There will always be an excess of bad ideas and dumb money in the market--so we'll always be complaining about a lack of talent, no matter how many developers there are. Still, I contend that most companies have no idea how to hire, and in the last week, my theory got proved to me several times ov
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Top Surprises When Starting Out as a Software Developer
Even though more than 20 years have passed, I still remember wondering what it would be like to finish university and start working. Up until that point, I had pretty much spent my whole life in sc…
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Telling people to leave finance
I used to work in finance, and now I don’t. I haven’t regretted leaving for a moment, even when I’ve been unemployed and confused about what to do next. Lots of my friends that I …
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Work on unimportant problems
It seems obvious that some problems are important to solve and some aren't, as in, curing cancer is more important than delivering social gaming. Often, people lament the abundance of tech firms working on ultimately unimportant stuff, and advise to work on important problems and not just chase the money.
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How to leave academia (for science PhDs)
So you've decided to leave academia, or are perhaps just thinking about doing so. Welcome to the dark side. I made the transition a few years ago, and since then I've gotten a number of questions about how to do it. Hence, this article. First of all, I'm going to …
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Does one have to be a genius to do maths?
Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly. (José Ortega y Gasset, “Notes on t…
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Learning from competition
I experimented with custom fonts in Instapaper last year, but my efforts fizzled out. Before iOS 5, rendering custom fonts in a UIWebView on iOS was extremely buggy and slow. And nearly all of my licensing inquiries to font foundries went unanswered, so I couldn’t legally ship any of the fonts I wanted even if I could…
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Mistakes I made as a young entrepreneur
I started my first business eight years ago in 2004. I’ve managed teams as small as two (from our top bedroom), all the way to my current 54-person team at Treehouse. I’ve had some wins and plenty of losses and learned a lot of things the hard way. Hopefully other business owners can avoid these un-fun mistakes …
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Of Booze and Brogrammers
There's been a little bit of noise about the culture of "hard partying" at programmer conferences. Ryan complains about binge drinking , a...
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$26,679 in 24 hours: Stats from my latest book launch
Do you work on web applications? Then you’d probably learn a lot from my new book, Designing Web Applications. A few years ago I had no idea a day like last Wednesday was even possible. After all, everyone I knew worked jobs that paid a modest yearly salary. My wealthier friends made closer to $250/day […]
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I'm not a "curator"
Curator’s Code is an attempt to codify and standardize “via” links and attribution from link blogs and aggregators with two new symbols: