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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
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What does a research grant pay for?
People don't usually share what a research grant pays for, so here are the budgets from mine.
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There is no software maintenance
Every time I hear about software maintenance as a distinct activity, I cringe. That’s because it is based on the outdated notion that first software is developed, then it is maintained. But t…
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Resilience and Waste in Software Teams
Resilience is coping with unexpected events and environmental change. To have resilience, you need slack. Slack in software development lets people do the little tasks that keep the work moving smo…
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When I have a slower publishing cadence my blog grows faster
When I started writing online, the advice I got was to publish frequently and not overthink any single piece. The logic was this: the outcome for blog posts is a heavy-tailed statistical distribution—most pieces will be read by barely anyone, but a small subset of outliers will do hundreds if not thousands of times…
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To be productive, be prepared
Motivation by itself gives us the willingness to do something, but nothing more. Once we make a start, the game changes and it becomes about knowing how to make progress.
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How to write a cold email (2020)
Some tips on writing a cold email.
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Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
Friday was my 9 year anniversary of starting as a Developer Evangelist at Twilio. Monday I was laid off.
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How to run a miserable code review
Code reviews are a performance nobody paid for
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Amazon doubling down on return to office
The tech giant is not blinking: after the unprecedented pushback on its 3-day return to office policy last month, Amazon just made it clear that the policy is going ahead.
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How to build trust as a new engineering manager
New managers often want to get everything right from the get-go. But, ironically, that would be their first mistake. Why? Because that's the total opposite of authenticity.
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What’s wrong with billable hours
I know a bunch of you already have your pitchforks out, so let me start out by establishing some goalposts for my premise. When I’m done, you may still want to skewer me, but at least it’ll be for the right reasons, if you do. Through the rest of the post, I’m going to draw...
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Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
Gamification works too well on me. I'll do anything for a high score, to complete a progress bar, or to unlock an achievement.
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The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
A long, close reading of Poppendieck's talk on how plans quietly become the thing we manage instead of the outcome, from the Empire State Building up.
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The heaviness of maintaining systems
Our systems and ourselves
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Preparing for missions in difficult places
Can I bring my emotional support dog?
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The End of Front-End Development
Large language models like GPT-4 are becoming increasingly capable, at an alarming rate. Within a couple of years, we won't need developers any more! …Or at least, that's the narrative going viral on social media. I'm much more optimistic about what these AI advancements mean for the future of software development.
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Better to micromanage than be disengaged
For a long time, I found the micromanager CEO archetype very frustrating to work with. They would often pop out of nowhere, jab holes in the work I had done without understanding the tradeoffs, and then disappear when I wanted to explain my decisions. In those moments, I wished they would trust me based on my track…
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When feedback is not a gift
Feedback is the lifeblood of getting better, but be careful who you accept feedback from.
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Repeating yourself thrice doesn’t turn you into a 3x developer
Three is a magic number. This is the number of things we can keep in our minds without losing focus. So, logically, a three-tier software…
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Triplebyte acquired by Karat
Karat acquires Triplebyte's adaptive assessment technology to help companies eliminate resume bias, reduce candidate drop-off, and hire engineers more fairly.
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What Do We Owe Our Teams?
Many of my discussions with product leaders (CPOs, VPs and others who manage teams of product folks) are about the substance of product management: portfolios, competing stakeholders, pricing & packaging, tarot cards as a revenue forecasting model. Last week, though, in my product leadership workshop, we had an…
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How to build toxic software teams
To build a toxic team, you must inject poison early and often
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Remote work is the best thing to happen to families in decades
Yet commentators and politicians keep missing it
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Corporate legibility for software engineers
Understand corporate legibility through the lens of a software engineer.
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Advice to a novice programmer
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The hardest part of being a junior developer
Even though it was 12 years ago, I still remember what the most stressful part of being a junior developer was.