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The Bitter Truth of Learning: It’s Tough, Unpleasant, and Often Pointless
Sometimes an insignificant interaction, or an excerpt from a book, is capable of provoking a life-changing insight. It might be an obvious lesson, but it feels epiphanic because it fits differently into my understanding of things. For instance…
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Are interruptions worse for programmers than for other knowledge workers?
This is quite a popular cartoon. I posted this in a comment on why programmers wear headphones a...
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Turning a side project into an open-source project
The world benefits from open source, big time. In this blog post, we’re going to spell out how you and the world can benefit from your side project, too.
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Joanna Rutkowska leaves Qubes OS, joins Golem
Earlier this year, I decided to take a sabbatical. I wanted to reflect on my infosec work and decide what I would like to focus on in the coming years. As you probably know, I’ve spent the last nine years mostly fighting the battle to secure the endpoint, more specifically creating, dev...
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On being an Engineering Manager
Would you like to study a programming language but can’t quite make up your mind on what’s the best option for you?
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The Declining Value of a CS Master's Degree (2013)
I don’t know if it helps, but Illinois CS distinguishes the two kinds of programs with two different degrees: MS in CS for the research program, and MCS for the coursework program. Most of the MS students receive funding andtuition waivers, while I’m not sure if the MCS students are even eligible for support.
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What Happens When a Founder Is Fully Vested?
Let’s say you are the founder and CEO of a startup and you have now been at it for four years. The company is doing great, you’ve raised several rounds of financing, you have a product in the market that is solving a real problem, you have a bunch of customers, you have a growing […]
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What I’ve Been Doing Since Quitting My Job
An update on my progress since going off to work on my own.
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Do What You Love and Starve? (2006)
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John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings
Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters. Most real-world programs run plenty fast enough on today's machines without any particular attention to…
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How to Host or Attend a Tiny Conference
Every year since 2012, I co-hosted an annual “tiny” conference that we call “Big Snow Tiny Conf”. 11 other business owners and myself travel to a beautiful ski/snowboarding resort and stay together in a house. In between ski/snowboard runs, we’re talking business strategy, giving and getting advice.
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From Rails to Clojure, Then to Java, Then Back to Rails
In the past 6 years I’ve worked on web applications in Rails, Clojure, Java and back to Rails. This is an overview of these past years, the benefits of working with such different tech stacks, and also it’s drawbacks.
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My experience with off-shoring teams and what went wrong
This is the return code blog, tech and other stuff.
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Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing – Aka RFCs
I have recently been talking at small and mid-size companies, sharing engineering best practices I see us use at Uber, which I would recommend any tech company adopt as they are growing. The one topic that gets both the most raised eyebrows, as well the most "aha!" moments is
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Developer on Call
For the system at work, I am on call one week every seven weeks. For most of the past ten years, I have been on organized on call rotations for the systems I have been developing. I think being on …
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Strange and maddening rules
There’s this popular idea among developers that when you face a problem with code, you should get out a rubber duck and explain, to the duck, exactly how your code was supposed to work.
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What the interns have wrought, 2018 edition
Yet again, intern season is coming to a close, and so it’s time to look back at what the interns have achieved in their short time with us. I’m always impres...
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Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success
Skill stacking is a strategy that you can use to achieve career success. You can use it whether you want to build a business or have a dream job.
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When your manager isn't supporting you, develop a manager crew
In my years of coaching managers and individual contributors, I’ve routinely heard the following complaints about their bosses:
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Organizational Debt
We all know that classic aphorism: Year comes to an end, Rust blog post press send. This is mine. There are lots of cool technical improvements to Rust that I want the project to achieve this year, and a few in particular that I’m definitely going to be putting a lot of time into. But this blog post is going to talk…