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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself
For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.
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Hello, GitHub
@natfriedman
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Productivity
I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets...
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Questions
Some questions that I find interesting. I've omitted some that are related to Stripe. ( Pointers to interesting readings on these topics are always welcome, as are pointers to responses.)
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A Career Cold Start Algorithm
Starting a new job can be stressful so I've developed an algorithm that has helped me get up to speed quickly.
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Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup
When I first joined a startup in 2012 I did my best to ask the right questions when interviewing. My engineering background prepared me for engineering tasks and helped me write a resume, but it didn’t prepare me well for how to evaluate a startup offer. While this might be obvious to some, this is what I wish I knew…
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My somewhat complete salary history as a software engineer
Sharing my salary history to help women understand what they should be making.
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MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
[See update at the bottom of the post.] I make and sell a security product called the SC4-HSM which, among other things, acts as a FIDO U...
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Grow the Puzzle Around You
In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." Today there are hundreds of them all over the world, but in 2005 what we were doing was so unusual that most people in Silicon Valley...
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Useful Mental Models (2016)
These are some mental models I find useful. They’re rooted in decades of experience of thousands of experts – a modern equivalent of folk wisdom. Mental models are useful to quickly and correctly reason about seemingly intractable problems. They require quite a bit of intuition to properly internalize, but once you’ve…
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How to Keep Your Job as Your Company Grows
I know a change is going to come If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing R…
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The Resistance Is Real – Why Side Projects Are So Hard
Today marks 15 full months that I’ve been working on a side project called Crafd. It’s a community for people who make things by hand: In that time I’ve: Talked to zero potential …
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Software development requires servant leaders
The idea of “servant” leaders has been on the rise in the agile community of late. Robert K. Greenleaf coined the term in a 1970 essay, but the idea is timeless.
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Why Aren't There C Conferences?
Most widely-used programming languages have at least one regular conference dedicated to discussing it. Heck, even Lisp has one . It’s a place to talk about the latest developments of the language, recent and upcoming standards, and so on. However, C is a notable exception. Despite its role as the foundation of the…
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The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)
technology as if people mattered
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Slack is the opposite of organizational memory
The internet is not a dumptruck and neither am I
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I Write Letters to CEOs
I write letters to CEOs and many of them write me back. Here are some of the responses that I’ve received and the lessons that I’ve learned.
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