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What If I Don't Actually Like My Users? (2008)
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I Am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He Is Wrong About Women in Tech
My name is Amilia St. John and I am the daughter of Alex St. John. Yes, that one. For those not following the horrific toddler meltdown my…
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“Write Every Day” Is Bad Advice: Hacking the Psychology of Big Projects
A Flawed Axiom Write every day. If you’ve ever considered professional writing, you’ve heard this advice. Stephen King recommends it in his instructional memoir, On ... Read more
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Overcoming Intuition in Programming
In a [series of experiments](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/alteretal.pdf), researchers set out to discover the relationship between difficulty or
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Become a 10x Programmer by Managing Your Time Better
Become aware of bad habits that make you less productive and learn how to break them with proper time management skills.
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Diving into Other People's Code
This post will walk you through an exercise in diving into someone else's code. The goal will be to make an arbitrary change to the code of the Spyder Python IDE , a project I have never touched before in my life, and learn just enough about it to accomplish what I want without getting bogged down. You will learn how…
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How becoming a pilot made me a better programmer
Two years ago I trained for my private pilot license over the course of nine months. Besides be...
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Where are you in your company's layoff list?
Where are you in your company's layoff list? Every company has one, even if it's just a vague idea in the mind of the CEO. By looking a...
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How to ace a YC interview
Spring has sprung, and the smell of fresh YC applications is in the air. It’s that special time that happens twice a year where thousands…
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Anti Mediocracy Manifesto for Software Development
XOScript is a simple server-side scripting language.
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Farewell, App Academy. Hello, Airbnb – Part 2
(Note: this is the second part of this story. You can read the first part here.) Despite the rejection from 23AndMe, I kept pushing. I applied to all the big hiring websites. Hired rejected me from...
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Tech worker resistance is crucial to preventing human rights abuses in the U.S
Hi, I am Valerie Aurora, systems archictecture consultant, writer, and cat appreciator. At Bow Shock Systems , I solve difficult systems problems in networking, file systems, and operating systems. In 2023 I moved permanently to Amsterdam after 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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How I Deal with Harassment, Abuse, and Crazies in General
Whenever I write about a topic that upsets me, I calm myself by illustrating it with royalty-free, reassuring stock photos. "People are...
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Becoming a Professor
Photo by Daderot [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons When I was first appointed as the director of the MIT Media...
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No more rock stars: how to stop abuse in tech communities
Content note for discussion of abuse and sexual violence. In the last couple of weeks, three respected members of the computer security and privacy tech communities have come forward under their ow…
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We don't need a Tech Lead
When it comes to medium to large teams it is quite common the presence of a full-time tech lead responsible for important leadership activities such as:
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Google recruitment mistakes: part 3
It has been a while that I have been contacted by a recruiter, and the last few ones were fairly decent conversations, where they made an effort to research me first, and even if they did not get everything right, they still listened, and we had a productive talk. But four days ago, I had another recruiter reach out…
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Exploding offers are bullshit
I do a lot of recruiting and have given maybe 50 offers in my career. Although many companies do, I never put a deadline on any of them. Unfortunately, I've often ended up competing with other companies who do, and I feel really bad that this usually tricks younger developers into signing offers.
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Architecture astronauts take over
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
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Camels and Rubber Duckies
You’ve just released your latest photo-organizing software. Through some mechanism which will be left as an exercise to the reader, you’ve managed to actually let people know about it. …
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The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster
Business is noisy. Business is full of people worrying loudly about projects, processes, and other people. These people have opinions, and they share them all
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Markets, discrimination, and "lowering the bar"
Public discussions of discrimination in tech often result in someone claiming that discrimination is impossible because of market forces. Here's a quote from Marc Andreessen that sums up a common view 1 .