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The Three Kinds of Laziness
We speak of three kinds of laziness. The first is simply to spend all your time eating and sleeping. The second is to tell yourself, "Someone like me will never manage to perfect themselves." In...
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Domain Knowledge or a Lack Thereof
I believe that a lack of domain knowledge is the root cause of a lot of very bad software that gets developed and I think that it is up to computer programmers and their managers to deal with this. Acquiring domain knowledge is an essential component in the development of software that really works well for its users…
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The IIT Entrance Exam
This is the story of India's Joint Entrance Examination, the yearly attempt to pick out the ten thousand most intelligent students in a country of 1.2 billion people.
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The Positive Programmer
My thoughts on the negativity in the tech community, how I went from a miserable, negative programmer to a happy one, and small steps to get there.
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Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?
It isn't hard to find criticisms of Microsoft's employee appraisal system. Whether it's almost decade old complaints such as Mini-Microsoft’s Microsoft Stack ...
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Productizing A Freelancing / Consulting Business
How consultancies can get recurring revenue, deepen client relationships, and improve project outcomes by using some tactics from software companies.
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Our SQL interview questions
The exact SQL questions we ask developer candidates during interviews, with the schema and the answers. Steal them for your own hiring.
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A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist
A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013 Here is an exchange between the Global Editor of the Atlantic Magazine and myself this afternoon attempting to solicit my professional service…
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Sucks to be an old engineer
As if the coming wave of foreign engineers resulting from the inevitable immigration bill isn’t bad enough, I saw this comment left on a Wall Street Journal article: At my recent 40th Stanford reun…
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Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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"Careless" employees
Recently a friend said to me, "My remote engineer contractors aren't committed enough. They say they'll get a feature finished by the end ...
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Why the last 20% of work takes the same amount of time as the first 80%
You know when developers tell you that they did 80% of the application in x days and that they need the same amount of time for the last 20%?
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College was my biggest mistake (2012)
When I turned 18, my parents expected me to go to college- it was the only option, the only way to be a successful adult. I’m a 2nd generation Italian. My mother and grandparents came over to America and bootstrapped themselves from nothing, so nee...
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Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
The start of my sabbatical has given me a moment to reflect on my publications. But my CV only shows a list of neatly cataloged papers: title, authors, conference. Each one appearing no different from another. But how each paper ended up published is its own story, a story about people and opportunity.
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“Working Too Hard And Not Getting Anywhere”
Continuing the case method on MBA Mondays, I am going to tell a story about a business model pivot that was not a full business pivot. In the lull between Flatiron and Union Square Ventures, I made a few angel investments and the best one was in a company called TACODA that went on to […]
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Advice for ambitious 19 year olds
“I’m an ambitious 19 year old, what should I do?” I get asked this question fairly often, and I now have a lot of data on what works, so I thought I’d share my response. Usually, people are...
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"Attrition is a group statistic. It doesn't apply to me."
10 years ago I sat down with my brother. He was about to attend a high attrition special forces course. The vast majority of candidates drop out. Aren't you concerned about the failure rate? ...