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Reflections on My Decade at Sumo Logic
Debug, simplify and execute.
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Earning the privilege to work on unoriginal problems
The startup world is almost by definition a place where you “live in the future”. Working in an early-stage startup, your whole belief system is based on being able to successfully create something new. Something that will become a great and cherished product, used all around the world. It needs to be this way, or…
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Limits of Programmer Productivity: A lesson from Fred Brooks
Fred Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month in 1974, describing the lessons he learned leading IBM’s OS/360 project during the 1960s. As technology goes, it’s ancient. Consider the workflow for a “debugging run”:
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Why you’re going about recovering from perfectionism all wrong (2021)
Stop murdering your village of weirdos.
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The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
The ARM powered Thinkpad x13s is the first truly premium Windows on ARM laptop. Let's see how that actually stacks up as a software engineer!
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Cognitive distortions that undermine clear thinking
Leaders are paid to think clearly. And a big impediment to clear thinking is what CBT/REBT calls Cognitive Distortions: errors in thinking or thinking traps we commonly fall for. Most high-performers are not pathological, but instead fall for them when upset or in high-stress situations. In this
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Development slowness in big and legacy applications
Software companies come in many sizes. There are small startups, medium-sized companies, and huge enterprises. As you might expect, startups are usually lean and fast. Big companies that develop large applications move much more slowly. Those might be systems developed for many years or decades by hundreds of…
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How to add documentation to your product life cycle
An evaluation of different processes used to create documentation, and their advantages and disadvantages for the organization, the customer, and the writer.
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Mistakes You Should Never Make (2014)
I was walking to a team meeting where I was going to announce that we would likely have to lay off nearly all of our employees because we unexpectedly had almost no money left, and that it was all my fault.
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Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
OKRs for Managers and C-Level? Great! But have you ever asked your teams? In this post I am sharing how I make OKRs less dry and more enjoyable for the teams I manage.
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How (not) to apply for a software job
Advice for how to (and how not to) apply for a software engineering job, particularly for the written parts of the interview process. As a bonus, some tips for your resume/CV.
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Demystifying burnout – A deep dive into its symptoms and remedies
Discover the roots of burnout, its distinct symptoms, and key causes. Learn to identify potential signs and explore strategies to overcome this chronic syndrome.
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Docs Deserve More Respect
A plea for more respect for documentation and technical writing in the software development industry.
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Street fighting engineers vs. martial arts engineers
Street fighters and Martial artists.
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Building personal and organizational prestige
Most months I get at least one email from an engineering leader who believes they’d be a candidate for significantly more desirable roles if their personal brand were just better known. Similarly, when funding is readily available during periods of tech industry expansion, many companies believe they are principally…
317
Programming interviews turn normal people into a-holes
Subtitle: Yet Another Tech Interviewing Post There are hundreds and hundreds of blogs about how programming interviews suck, how they ask trivia questions or try to ask questions that only fresh graduates would know well (sort binary trees is the classical example). All these theories are correct, but I have
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Spoil your secret sauce
Go on an adventure. Find a New Thing™. Bring it back. Share it, and demonstrate why the New Thing™ is worth sharing.
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How to Ask Questions the Smart Way (2014)
Translations: Brazilo-Portuguese Chinese (Traditional) Czech Dutch Estonian French Georgian German Greek Hindi Hungarian Indonesion Japanese Lithuanian Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Ukrainian Uzbek If you want to copy, mirror, translate, or excerpt this document, please see my copying policy .
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I Am No Longer Speaking at RustConf 2023
I will no longer be speaking at RustConf 2023 about A (Possible) Future for Compile-Time Programming.
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A student's guide to startups (2006)
October 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.) Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup. But how common will that be? I'm sure the default will always be to get a job, but starting a startup…