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I was laid off in retaliation for anti-discrimination whistleblowing
In order to protect women, gender nonconforming folks, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community from suffering as my peers and I have, I feel ethically obligated to go public with my ex…
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Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)
Good news: we have a neat, universal milestone on the journey to mastery. What that looks like, and how to use it.
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Does your office have a library?
Let's get weird... here are some questions. These questions aren't special questions or specifically meant as only this set of questions... they are just questions that capture the spirit of 'pause and think on some stuff that you don't'. Fill in your own questions if you have better ones.
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A blog post is a long and complex search query to find people (2022)
When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media.
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Developer marketing for early-stage startups – what we’ve learned
Since starting PostHog in 2020, we’ve learned a bunch about what does and doesn’t work when it comes to marketing to engineers. There are plenty of…
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Getting to know the right people (2022)
This page has moved to https://drmaciver.com/notebook/2022/06/getting-to-know-the-right-people/ .
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Before you try to do something, make sure you can do nothing
If you can't do nothing, then don't expect to be able to do something.
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Small Teams
Patrick Collison has a great list of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things. Inspired by that, I created a page of impressive things accomplished by small teams.
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On a great interview question
Between 2010 and 2019 I interviewed dozens of Software Engineer candidates at Google. Almost always I asked the same interview question…
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Career advice no one gave me: Give a lot of notice when you quit
2 weeks notice is the gold standard when quitting. But giving more notice (a lot more notice) actually has a lot of benefits.
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My best techniques for evaluating character
These methods have helped me enormously—and can save you much heartache and anxiety
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Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
Yesterday we had a super fun meetup here at Intercom in Dublin. We split up into small discussion groups and talked about things related to managing teams and being a senior individual contributor (IC), and going back and forth throughout your career.
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Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)
Digg was having a rough year. Our CEO left the day before I joined. Senior engineers ghosted out the door, dampening productivity and pulling their remaining friends. We had only one remaining shot at revival, launching our two-years in the making rewrite: Digg v4. It did not go as planned.
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My failed attempt at using a closet as an office
My partner and I both work from home. I'm very thankful for that as we have two young children and a commute would take up the same time we ...
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The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews
Companies spend thousands of dollars to buy fake reviews and get bad ones removed.
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Leave work slightly unfinished for easier flow the next day
A breakdown of 4 simple software engineering and coding habits that improved my productivity. These include keyboard shortcuts, learning to say no, reaching flow state faster, and keeping a big book of commands handy.
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Lessons from 5 years of running a tech meetup
Possibly the one you're Googling about.
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Excuse me, is there a problem?
Many startups fail despite identifying a real problem and building a product that solves that problem. This explains why, so you can avoid their fate.
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Just know stuff (or, how to achieve success in a machine learning PhD)
Introduction So I recently completed my PhD in Mathematics from the University of Oxford. (Hurrah! It was so much fun.) In 2-and-a-bit years I wrote 12 papers, received 4139 GitHub stars, got 3271 Twitter followers, authored 1 textbook – doing double-duty as my thesis – and got the coveted big-tech job-offer. On…
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“Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees
“Layoffs kill people,” says Jeffrey Pfeffer. And they don’t cut costs or improve productivity.
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Engineers should focus on writing
All engineers are good writers of code. I argue that they should also write non-code.
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Of regrets
Here is a copy of the MIT license. One of the well-known open source licenses. It is, effectively, the only license that I’ve used for software I wrote or contributed in the last 10 years:
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Some personal news
An update about me, FiveThirtyEight and the future after the Disney layoffs
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Getting things done in small increments (2022)
Many programmers subscribe to the belief that they need large blocks of uninterrupted time to get anything done. Paul Graham wrote about this in Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule :
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Ask yourself dumb questions and answer them (2020)
Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical sp…
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