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Escaping the Roadmap Trap
Stop chasing your feature development plan and start crafting strategic product roadmaps
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Being on Call
I’m an occasional on-call operator for my battalion, assisting the on-call commander and staffing the control room from 16:00 in the afternoon until
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Software Sweatshop – Inside Billionaire Joe Liemandt's Empire
The story of buying a software company out of bankruptcy and our plan to grow it.
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“That Won't Work”
Imagine the scene: Several people are discussing a problem that needs an urgent solution. Everyone is deep in thought, and one person proposes a solution. “We could…” and everyone listens intently. As soon as the person is done talking, or perhaps even before, somebody speaks up. “That won’t work!” he says. The…
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Unpacking Interview Questions
A series sharing some of the questions I use when I interview for technical roles. I’ll unpack the question, when to ask it, and how to evaluate answers.
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Routing the Technical Interview
The interviewer couldn’t help but notice her name, Nephele . It sounds Greek. But he didn’t ask, not wanting to get off on the wrong foot with the promising candidate. He made a mental note to look up the name afterwards.
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Things to do before and after you write code
The most effective engineers I’ve worked with were effective not just because of how they wrote code, but because of things they did when they were not writing code. Here’s my (growing)…
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Best Practices – Why I Hate Them
I hate the expression “best practice”, it’s so, so often used by someone to justify the application of cargo cult without actually understanding why.
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A writing tip I learned at Oxford
No, this is not an essay about commas
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Two stories about tacit knowledge
To build a nuke or (can) not build a nuke
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Dropbox is reducing its workforce by 11%
Today, our cofounder and CEO Drew Houston shared the difficult news that we’ll be making reductions to our global workforce. Here is the full text of his email to Dropbox employees:
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How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
A response to a developer weighing Clojure's benefits, explaining the REPL workflow through human-computer interaction and reflecting on individual productivity.
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Things I was asked to do while job hunting
The hiring process could stand some improvements.
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The school for sysadmins who can’t timesync good
(With apologies to Derek Zoolander and Justin Steven. And to whoever had to touch the HP-UX NTP setup at Queensland Police after I...
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Who's at the Helm?
Or, how to deploy 25+ CVEs to prod in one command!
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A Review of “Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems”
There are many books available that deal with modernising legacy codebases. These books generally focus on how to go about understanding the legacy system, improving test coverage, introducing build automation, as well as strategies for refactoring or rearchitecting the codebase. However, Marianne Bellotti’s Kill It…
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Compensation as a Reflection of Values
Compensation: the word alone is enough to trigger a fight-or-flight reaction in many. But we in technology have the good fortune of being in a well-compensated domain, so why does this issue induce such anxiety when our basic needs are clearly covered? If it needs to be said, it’s because compensation isn’t merely…
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From zero to hero: contributing to open source (2017)
Do you ever get the feeling that you are always a consumer and never a contributor to a library? Would you like to get more involved in open source projects and don’t know how? This is the&nb…
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Beyond coupling and cohesion: strategies for un-fucking yourself
This post belongs in the ‘highly speculative’ category. It contains ideas that I’ve yet to flesh out and properly pin down. Reader beware!
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Ways to ship software
An open letter from a former Facebook and VMware engineering executive on how startups can best structure their release processes.
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On Hubris and Humility
Last week I gave a talk at the Open Source Firmware Conference about some of the work I’m doing at Oxide Computer, entitled On Hubris and Humility. There is a video of the talk if you’d like to watch it in video form. It came out pretty alright!