The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
Whatsapp had 450 million monthly users and just 32 engineers when it was acquired. Imgur scaled to over 40 billion monthly image views with just seven engineers. Instagram had 30 million users and just 13 engineers when it was acquired for $1 billion dollars. This is the new normal: fewer engineers and dollars to…
My journey into the Berlin startup scene
Six years as Heroku’s CTO was the greatest professional experience of my life. But what’s next?
The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I Work So Much
Academics constantly complain about being overworked, yet they also praise their freedom to decide how and when to work as one of the great ...
Great Programmers (2004)
I've seen a lot of discussion of great programmers, usually centering on how to find them, but usually what people really want to know is how to become one. Since I'm widely considered to be a great programmer, I'll give some advice. First of all there's raw coding ability. For this, practice makes…
The value of an engineering degree
Six years ago, in the summer of 2008, NYU and Polytechnic University came together to create NYU Poly, NYU’s engineering school in downtown Brooklyn. When I saw the news, I called NYU President John Sexton and asked for a meeting. He agreed and I went down to Washington Square to meet with him. I told […]
So a female programmer walks into a bar…
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Sales Hiring Guide For B2B Startup Founders
Everything you need to know about sales hiring for startups: the stages, a 5-step recruiting process, and strategies to build a top team.
Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
I want to discuss why programming and coding are not the same, and why I can no longer support the Learn to Code movement. I can no longer tell my friends to learn coding. Although I’m passionate about it, it’s too arcane and insular for mainstream practice.
Stranger in a Strange Land: “Big Data” programmer meets HPC community
I attended the SIAM PP 2014 conference this week, because I'm developing an interest in MPI-style parallel algorithms (also, it was close b...
Why I Left the .NET Framework
The .NET Framework was good. Really good. Until it wasn’t. Why did I leave .NET? In short, it constrained our ability to choose (which is a huge deal for
Signs you might be in "Survival Mode"
A list of early warning signs that a software team is in survival mode, such as constant urgency, missing context, no time to reduce risk and long stress.
The Next Mission
Slides for the brief talk that I gave at a Harvard seminar on privacy and user data organized by John Taysom last week.
Three months at Y Combinator: what it’s like and how to get in
Take a look into Front’s Journey to get into Y Combinator.
Advice for ambitious 19 year olds (2013)
“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...