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Doing too much work on one's own before looping in others
Throughout my career, the biggest mistake I see engineers make is doing too much work on their own before looping in others.
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Unlearning perfectionism
A way out from the perfectionism trap
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The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)
This is a story of how it took me way too long to ship a product, and I ended up paying for a competitor product instead.
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On my resignation as regulator of the Dutch intelligence and security services
I’ve seen some mediocre automated translations of my Dutch language resignation statement go round. To prevent any confusion, please find the story here in English: Until today I was one of the three members of the board that checks warrants for the Dutch intelligence and security services. This board is called…
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App Store doesn't accept “too simple” apps
I've had my fair share of App Store rejections in the past: - ⌘ rcmd was rejected for usage of private APIs - GammaDimmer was rejected for having a link to 🌕 Lunar (my app for controlling monitors that would never get accepted on the App Store) ...
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Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
During interviews, technical skills in the industry are still largely vetted through LeetCode-style questions. These are small algorithmic riddles in the for...
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How to communicate effectively as a developer
Some tactical and strategic tips for writing effectively as a software developer.
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On Being Indispensable
It took far too long for it to click in my brain that I was stuck. There was no career path. Sure my title changed, pay went up, but my day-to-day never changed. I was so busy collaborating with dozens of people across all departments, that it felt like I was growing. I wasn’t.
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Job interview questions engineers should ask, but don't
Since we started PostHog, our team has interviewed 725 people. What's one thing I've taken from this? It's normal for candidates not to ask harder…
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My guiding principles after 20 years of programming (2020)
I’ve been programming since 1999. This year I’ve officially coded for 20+ years. I’ve started with Basic but soon jumped into Pascal and C…
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People don't work as much as they say
There is a persistent idea that people work 40 hours a week. They don't, and if you try to do this it will break you. Here are some more reasonable guidelines.
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My seatbelt rule for judgment
One of my formative childhood lessons came when I was playing in the garage one day. I went into my mom’s car and put the seatbelt on (probably to pretend I was flying a plane). I realized at one point that I could still lean pretty far forward. Far enough that my head could touch the dashboard. How ridiculous! What’s…
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Why I'm in the Army Reserve – an explainer for my friends in tech
Outside my day job doing compiler research at Shopify, I lead the Cheshire Yeomanry , a squadron of British Army Reserve light cavalry . I spend about a hundred days a year of my spare-time in evenings, weekends, and holidays, training my Squadron.
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I got a computer science degree in 3 months for less than $5000 (2020)
Software developer based in Montréal, Canada
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Principles of Engineering Management
More than 2 years ago, I decided to try to create a brief, digestible manual on the expectations of management for senior engineers at my company who are considering making the shift. At the time, …
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Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven
Why software organizations should prefer genuinely good arguments to weak arguments dressed up with data and metrics.
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I stopped working on black hole information loss
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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My ADHD founder toolbox
Since I last wrote about ADHD at length, I’ve had a zillion conversations with people about it and heard from over a dozen people who’d pursued diagnosis after reading some of my yammer…
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Why I left Google: work-life balance
Software engineer and writer focused on developer tools, cloud infrastructure, and the intersection of technology and human behavior.
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Many software companies are a joke
The problems I will discuss in this article are not unique to the software industry. In fact, this is expected in many large companies…
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Teams is killing my Mac every day
I have a hard time believing I'm the first person to post this after not finding anything in the forum. I wouldn't doubt if Microsoft is deleting them...
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That wild Ask a Manager story
Ask A Manager had a wild story a week ago. A company interviewed someone, hired him, but when he showed up for work … it was a totally different person. A friend asked, “if this was your hire, and you manager asked you to change your hiring practices to prevent this, what would you do?” Nothing. I would do nothing…
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DevOps is broken
A Critique of How We've Fooled Ourselves for Years.