Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 363 posts.

Career & Management
93

You Are Not Paid to Write Code

“Taco Bell Programming” is the idea that we can solve many of the problems we face as software engineers with clever reconfigurations of the same basic Unix tools. The name comes from the fact that every item on the menu at Taco Bell, a company which generates almost $2 billion in revenue annually, is simply a…

105

CEO

In this post I’m going to try to give potential and actual CEO’s (and other C level execs to some extent) some actionable advice when it comes to how they conduct themselves in the hope that this will at some future date save some of you a great deal of misery and in some cases charges of misconduct or worse. My hope…

113

Why I close pull requests

I maintain many open source projects on GitHub and elsewhere (over 160 as of this writing). I have merged and/or closed thousands of Pull Requests (PRs) and patches in the past few years, and would like to summarize here many of the reasons I don't merge many PRs. A few of my projects have co-maintainers, but most are…

120

Coding without Google

Back in 2016, an intriguing article appeared on Reddit: “Do Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently?”. The author discussed if expert programmers use google more often than novice coders. He mentioned that using google is a good thing. It helps to find the best solutions, validate ideas, speed the development…