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Does Your Code Pass the Turkey Test? (2008)
Over the past 6 years or so, I’ve failed each item on “The Turkey Test.” It’s very simple: will your code work properly on a person’s machine in or around th...
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Dead Air on the Incident Call
Silence can mean different things to different people in different situations. In this post, I’ll present a few incident scenarios and explore the role of the incident commander in breaking (…
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Code review antipatterns
Code review seems like a great idea, right? Two developers looking at the same code means two chances to spot problems; it spreads understanding of the way the project is evolving; the reviewer can learn useful tricks from reading the author’s code in detail, or spot opportunities to teach the author a useful trick…
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A long guide to giving a short academic talk (2022)
Giving a talk is a lot like selling a car. Take them for a test drive, don’t read them the owner’s manual.
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There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
Bill Caputo , through repeated conversations we've had, has convinced me of something very surprising. It was something that changed the way I think about the world, and how I do my job.
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Companies need junior devs
Junior engineers are foundational to whether a team can collaborate and innovate
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On Good Software Engineers
I set out to find a simple definition that would help managers frame the fundamental things they expect from software engineers.
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Haunted by my own projects
Sometimes the new and shiny thing is way more fun than the thing that I genuinely want to ship... later.
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Bad stuff going down at the American Sociological Association
I knew the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Statistical Association, and the National Academy of Sciences had problems. It turns out the American Sociological Association does some bad things too.
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Carta's 83b Oversight: A Tax Trap for Married Startup Employees (2023)
There's a blind spot in Carta's 83(b) election feature you need to know about if you're married and living in California.
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What the The end of 0% interest rates means for software engineers
The end of 10+ years of 0% interest rates is set to change the tech industry. What do higher rates mean for software engineering jobs, developers, and careers; and how can you prepare for this shift?
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Let's Stop Asking "Why Do You Want to Work for Us?" In Interviews
Most people want to work for your company for money, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
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Notes from an Interviewer
These days I find myself interviewing quite a few candidates. Some are good, some aren’t. So it goes. However, there is another group who I feel could be good but just aren’t showing it…
254
How we engineer feedback at Figma with eng crits
A behind the scenes look at engineering crits at Figma.
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Do literally anything
Feeling overwhelmed? Don't know where to start? Do literally anything.
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Releasing my tools under the MIT License was probably a mistake (2023)
For basically as long as I can remember, I have been a staunch defender of permissive licenses over the more copyleft variety. I want you to use things I've written. On top of that I don't believe it's my place to force you to then open source things you have written that expand upon my source code. Hence my extensive…
257
Software Design Principles I Learned the Hard Way
If there’s two sources of truth, one is probably wrong. And yes, please repeat yourself.
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Is the Job Market Dying?
how tech makes hiring worse
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It's not enough for a program to work – it has to work for the right reasons
Successful software is buggy software.
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Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on navigating complex systems
Few can measure the impact of a blog post they wrote, in the millions of dollars a year, but Patrick McKenzie has the receipts
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Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter
I am no longer investing in new companies.
262
Psychological safety vs. high standards: A misunderstood dynamic
The term “psychological safety” is often misleading. When managers hear safety, many dismiss it as a soft style that implies complacency. Meanwhile, psychology implies too much mumbo jumbo. High-profile figures like Elon Musk advocating for a “hardcore” style perpetuate this misconception. But this is a fundamental…
263
Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)
Don't panic! Here's how to tactfully answer salary expectations questions without costing yourself a ton of money
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Dean of Engineering at University of Nevada wrote a paper that’s bad
“As we look to sleep and neuroscience for answers we can study flies specifically the Drosophila melanogaster we highlight in our research.”
265
Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
We're a bunch of ex-Triplebyte people. We loved it there, and we're trying to make something like it. Here's how.
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Business advice plagued by survivor bias (2009)
Advice from "successful entrepreneurs" might be unreliable due to Survivor Bias. What's real, and what's random?
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Tips for Building and Deploying Robots
This post is not about research or developing software for robots. Instead it is some tips on how to go about building robots for mass deployment and how to leverage those deployed robots for improving your product.
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Lumina's legal threats and my about-face
I’m putting the post about Lumina Probiotics back up, now edited to avoid any possible threats of libel.
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My 3-year experiment as a digital nomad
As a full-time software engineer at Kapwing and full-time wanderer, I've learned a few things about how to be a digital nomad.