Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 437 posts.

Career & Management
313

There is no “us” in team

I’ve talked before about the non-team team dynamic that is “one person per task”. Where the management and engineers collude to push the organisation beyond a sustainable pace by making sure that at all times, each individual is kept busy and collaboration is minimised. I talked about the deleterious effect on…

315

Saying the Difficult Things

During the summer last year, I was doing my annual big hike with a friend. We use these hikes to see more of the country, and inevitably the conversations end up covering every topic under the sun. That day, we’d been talking about communication. In the evening, tucked away in a little cabin near Glencoe, something…

319

Leaving Debian

Today's story is an insider view of Debian. One of the oldest Linux distributions and probably one of the longest-running volunteer-based open-source projects. Joey Hess is my guest, and he dedicated significant parts of his adult life to working on Debian. He's going to share what that was like. The good and the bad…