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The Ponzi Career
The future of work is a pyramid scheme, where every person sells his favorite person to the next person.
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Leaving Google
The end of an era.
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5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
This is a story about me dreaming of building an online project that generates revenue, seeking financial independence and creative freedom. After five years and no success, it's still a dream. Let me tell you more about my failed projects. Planetoid (2015-2016) It's all started with a game. Who doesn't
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Finishing my first game while working full-time
Lessons from finishing my first game, Pocket Pong AR
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Leaving Google
Last Friday was my last day at Google. This article is a reflection on the last seven years of my life, thinking about what was important and what I'll do differently in the future.
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Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)
One year ago, I quit my day job to work on Zig full time . Since then, the project has seen a steady growth in funding. Thanks to the people donating, Zig is on track to become fully sustainable before my savings run out.
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The art of not taking things personally
Why other people’s emotions might not be about you — and your emotions might not be about them
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Facebook senior software engineer interview
I have been working at Facebook as a software engineer for a while now. During this time, I have got different inquiries from friends and…
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Takeaways from looking for a new senior role in tech
A few months ago, I left SeatGeek without much of a plan of what to do next. My green card was finally issued in 2021, which means that I didn’t have to scramble to find a new job in forty days. Fo...
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Maximizing Developer Effectiveness
To be successful at digital transformation you need to optimize the key feedback loops in your software engineering organization
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Work Hard (2007)
Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced … the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously… this feeling may last for hours at a tim…
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You don’t need to work on hard problems (2020)
A lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life—probably because that’s the only thing they’ve ever been rewarded for so far.
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How to Learn Stuff Quickly
As software developers, we're always learning new things; it's practically the whole gig! If we can learn to quickly pick up new languages/frameworks/tools, we'll become so much more effective at our job. It's sort of a superpower.
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Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over The Technical Interview lately. Many people realize that inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard has basically zero correlation to whether or not someone is actually a good software developer. The most effective programming test anyone’s come up with is still Fizzbuzz. One…
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I received my first donation on my open-source side project
I decided to build an extension for VSCode. That would add handy buttons for many common commands like save file, format file, show opened files etc.
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Tech compensation in 2021
Salaries in tech are going up, and many people are looking for new jobs or reevaluating the ones they have. However, many tech workers have no idea what their labor is worth on the open market. There’s a huge information asymmetry here: employers have access to detailed industry data on salaries, but workers don’t. In…
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Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
It’s well established that estimating software projects is hard. This is true, but you should learn how anyway.
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It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
I’ve spent nearly twenty years blogging, giving talks and releasing open source code. It’s been fantastic for my career, and a huge amount of work. But here’s a useful secret: …
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The SaaS Org Chart
You've raised a new funding round. You need to staff up. Here's what that looks like.
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The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
The personal website of Christopher Laing.
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What to Learn
It's common to see people advocate for learning skills that they have or using processes that they use. For example, Steve Yegge has a set of blog posts where he recommends reading compiler books and learning about compilers. His reasoning is basically that, if you understand compilers, you'll see compiler problems…
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Software engineering research is a train wreck
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
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Short fat engineers are undervalued
Professionals supposedly come in two shapes: either short and fat, or tall and skinny, meaning their skill set is either broad or deep.
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No, we won’t have a video call for that
Communications in distributed teams: a write-up of my talk from FrOSCon 2020, Cloud Edition.