Best of 2022

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2022. 370 posts.

Career & Management
152

Is my advice too mercenary?

A criticism of some of my writing is that it’s too mercenary. Some see my advice as coldly calculating, too focused on individual outcomes over collective ones, and implicitly distrustful of others. I think this is fair criticism! It’s not exactly what I’m going for, but it’s a fair reading. However, there’s more to…

158

Teaching how to code is broken

Typically: * Chapter 1: Types * Chapter 2: Variables * Chapter 3: Operators/Math * Chapter 4: Control structures * Chapter 5: Arrays * Chapter 6: Functions * Chapter 7: Structs * Chapter 8: Classes and Objects * Chapter 9: Methods * Chapter 10: Inheritance and Polymorphism * Chapter 11: Some advanced thing X * Chapter…

166

Apple Interview – 1995

In the 1990’s, I had access to the early internet (before the web) and made use of a public forum ( Usenet ) where I could ask and respond to questions about programming the Macintosh computer. I’ve mentioned before how this caught the attention of engineering at Apple ( Tom Dowdy , in any event). Perhaps too, the…

171

Founding Uber SRE

This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth. After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do…

173

Misidentifying talent

Out of context, you might think they were scouting actors or models, but these are baseball players ("A" is Lloyd Moseby, "B" is Jim Abbott, and "C" is Derek Jeter), ones that were quite good (Lloyd Moseby was arguably only a very good player for perhaps four years, but that makes him extraordinary compared to most…