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Focus on your own shit (2016)
Check Product Hunt. Ahh, crap. Someone just launched an app similar to my product (and we’re still in beta).
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My hiring experience as a submarine sonar operator in the Norwegian Navy
As some of you know I spent a year on a submarine. This is the story about how that came about.
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Django core no more
If you're not the sort of person who closely follows the internals of Django's development, you might not know there's …
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When to bring in the heavy hitters (2017)
Three questions to ask yourself before making a senior hire
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Transmuting Low-Value Programmer Cred into High-Value Status Illegibility
Not long ago, I wrote a post about that one, “top” software engineer role that companies don’t hire directly into. I’m going to pick up where I left off there. For a quick recap, recall the diagram I made (and my wife kindly GIF-ified for me). In red, you have the positions that a company...
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The Co-Founder Relationship
If you were making a list of things that could go wrong on an seed, angel, or Series A investment, you would have to put the co-founder relationship right up there at the top of the list. Not every startup has co-founders. Some just have one founder. In some ways, that is a bit easier […]
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How I Fail – Ian Goodfellow
Ian Goodfellow is a staff research scientist on the Google Brain team, where he leads a team of researchers studying adversarial techniques in AI. He was included in MIT Technology Review’s “35 und…
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Build a Focus System for Better Work/Life Balance as a Web Developer
An unproductive day leads me to feel like I need to keep working. A focus system can help your days as a developer feel productive, freeing up your personal time for things you enjoy.
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On the Law of Diminishing Specialization
On Productive Technology and its Discontents Recently, I’ve been dipping in and out of Edward Tenner’s provocative 1996 book, When Things Bites Back. In following ... Read more
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My misalignment with Apple's love affair with Swift
During my life as a software engineer there only have been a few occasions where the design and principles of a language struck me as inherently beautiful and consequently inspired me to work with them.
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Companies shouldn't give candidates homework assignments
There’s a trend among start-ups (and some larger companies) that worries me: giving candidates “homework” assignments. Homework assignments lead to candidate abuse. Knock it off (or at least be reasonable). I’ve seen many friends and clients go through this. As a pre-screening round before an onsite
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Is front-end development having an identity crisis?
Does front-end development as a we know it still exist; or has the role evolved into something we no longer recognise? As with evolution in nature, the evolution of "front-end" has resulted in several distinct flavours --- and in my opinion --- an identity crisis.
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Don’t Know What to Do with Your Life? Seek Bargains (2012)
A Career Crossroads In the early winter of 2004, I was a senior at Dartmouth College and in the fortunate position of having two good ... Read more
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Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)
[Another submission from a former postdoc at one of the top ten universities in the U.S. The e-mail came to me as follows: "I read your b...
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Things I did wrong as a professor (2016)
I really screwed things up as a young faculty member at Harvard. It worked out OK in the end, but, man, I wish I could go back in time to w...
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Why Most Software Engineers Lose Nothing by Unionizing
Should software engineers unionize? I can’t give a simple answer to this. There are advantages and disadvantages to enrolling in a collective bargaining arrangement. If the disadvantages didn…
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Where Yegge’s Wrong
Recently, Steve Yegge published two rants, each of which has gone viral and moved the Internet conversation needle a bit. I liked both of them, thought they were generally well-argued and useful. Unfortunately, there are a few assertions of fact there that are just wrong, and may be damaging. So I thought that, first…
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How to Pay Remote Employees
Running a remote company in the US requires using terrible government websites and filling out onerous paperwork. Tortuga [https://www.tortugabackpacks.com] has seven US-based employees across four states. Four of those employees have moved between states while working for Tortuga. In total, we've registered with…