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…
What are the underlying forces that account for the success of software engineering CEOs?
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.
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…
It’s well established that estimating software projects is hard. This is true, but you should learn how anyway.
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: …
You've raised a new funding round. You need to staff up. Here's what that looks like.
The personal website of Christopher Laing.
Two modes of operation leverage entirely different practices
We're shifting from rapid development and iteration of our algorithms to a slower and more hand-crafted approach.
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…
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...
Professionals supposedly come in two shapes: either short and fat, or tall and skinny, meaning their skill set is either broad or deep.
Communications in distributed teams: a write-up of my talk from FrOSCon 2020, Cloud Edition.
One of the watershed moments of my life was as a 20 year old intern attending a workplace presentation about personal finance. Over the course of one hour, I learnt about the power of buy-and-hold …
Mitchell Hashimoto takes on a new individual contributor role at HashiCorp.
My code doesn't compile. Why? The number of times in my career I have been asked a variation on "why doesn't my application work" is shocking. When you meet up with Operations people for drinks, you'll hear endless variations on it. Application teams attempting to assign ownership
Kristina Lustig, formerly our Director of Design, explains why she took a new role as an associate software developer.
"Luck Surface Area" is a turn of phrase that popped out my mouth during a discussion episode of TechZing a few months back and is something I've been meaning to write about ever since but never got around to actually doing. However, thanks to Lance Jones who referenced the concept in a recent blog post I have finally…
Back in 2007, I was searching for a software developer job at various companies. At one of these companies, the best strategy to get the job was to give a wrong answer. If this seems weird to you, let me explain what happened.
Coronavirus gain-of-function research comes from playing the "Science Game"
83% of Developers Suffer From Burnout, Haystack Analytics Study Finds
When we find ourselves in endless debates where everyone defends their idea, we don't know how to handle the situation. We eventually find a way out, but what we need is an excellent system.
