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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
I joined Google in October 2005, and handed in my resignation 18 years later. Last week was my last week at Google.
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I accidentally saved my company half a million dollars
I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.
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What I learned getting acquired by Google
Our 10 person startup gets acquired by Google, we rebuild our product the Google way, and begin to understand that amazing things are possible at Google, if you play the Google game
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My $500M Mars rover mistake
Some mistakes feel worse than death.
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Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
I quit my job towards the end of last month. When I started this blog, I told myself, “Don’t talk about work.” Since my employment is in the rear view mirror, I’m going to b…
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How I got here
My name is Preston Thorpe, I'm 31 years old and I've spent just under 10 years of my life in Prison (all for non-violent drug crimes.) I am currently incarcerated at Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine. More importantly, far more importantly, I am a software developer, open source maintainer…
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How to be a -10x Engineer
To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:
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Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
Westbrook spent 35 years in a codebase that allegedly powers some sort of medical software somewhere. During his tenure, he contributed hundreds of lines of code to his projects.
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Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple
I retired a year and a half ago after having worked for twenty-six years as a programmer for Apple. I’m not sure which would have been more surprising: if I had continued programming in my spare time after I had retired or if I never programmed again.
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Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
In January 2010 I soft-launched launched Preceden, a web-based timeline maker tool, followed a few weeks later by a larger launch on HackerNews: Today – almost 13 years to the day since the i…
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Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
We often hear that making small incremental improvements every day can lead to great things. This popular piece of advice rings true, and it’s a powerful reminder to keep pushing ourselves forward.
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Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job
Last weekend I had a chance to talk with some students who just got their degree. They are pursuing their first software engineer job. In conversation with them, I learned that they have a pretty wrong perception of this job.
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I worked at Google for -10 days
It’s the story of how I was laid off from Google before I even started to do my job there.
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TypeScripting the technical interview
An homage to Aphyr's Typing the technical interview
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Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better. Sometimes the gaps in our knowledge only become clear when explaining things to others.
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I got robbed of my first kernel contribution
Context Around a year and a half ago, I’ve asked my former company for some time to work on an issue that was impacting the debugging capabilities in our project: gdbserver couldn’t debug multithreaded applications running on a PowerPC32 architecture. The connection to the gdbserver was broken and it couldn’t control…
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Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
Apple still charges a $99 yearly developer fee, even if you don't want to publish your app on the Appstore. The provisioning certificate that Xcode provides only lasts one week.
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Costs of running a macOS app studio business
I created The low-tech guys, a brand under which I develop macOS apps for a living. I started this business with a good friend of mine, thinking I could help him stop working long hours at his consulting job and ease into more creative work. However, getting to a state where you earn enough to live off the app sales…
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I’m now a full-time professional open source maintainer
It works! I am now a full-time independent open-source maintainer. I'm announcing my first cohort of six clients, and sharing some details of how the model works.
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How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole
This is based on an internal quip doc I wrote up about careful communication in the context of rebuilding trust.
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Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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My startup banking story
As a relatively new member of adult society, and an absolute infant of the business world, I didn't think much about bank choice. I figured: you put money in, you take money out, they're all the same. I also figured a local branch of a global bank is just a fungible tentacle of the giant banking machine, so also…
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At this company, we are family
As I shared at our last family meeting, current economic conditions have forced family leadership to make many difficult decisions. I myself have reduced my golf outings to every other week, and you, undoubtedly, noticed that your mother’s car is no longer the current model year. Unfortunately, even these deep cuts…
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You are never taught how to build quality software
Learning how to build quality software is not part of computer science education. How do we learn it?
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