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You’re a slow thinker. Now what?
Figuring out how to lean in to my thinking style
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The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did
At FTX, Frank, and Pollen, software engineers were asked to do something potentially illegal, or to go along with what looked like fraud. They obliged in two out of three cases, landed in hot water, and now face jail time. A reminder why it’s never a good idea to go along with such requests.
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I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup attempts
A while back I wrote : I've had many, many failures in my life. (Hm, maybe I should write a blog post about that.) This is that post. I'm ...
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I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer
An alternate path for Staff+ engineers that optimizes for systems over spotlights and stewardship over fungibility.
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Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015)
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping
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20 years working on the same software product
I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has c…
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Live coding interviews measure stress, not coding skills
Live coding measure stress, not coding skills
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The Enterprise Experience
Reflections on working in a large enterprise — culture, process, and what I've learned in a year.
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Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
I spent a couple of years managing a team, and I entered that role – like many – without knowing anything about how to do it. I tried to figure out how to be a good manager, and doing so I ended up reading a lot about servant leadership . It never quite sat right with me, though. Servant leadership seems to me a lot…
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Tips for stroke-surviving software engineers
This is a pretty niche topic; I don't imagine there are many of us out there. Actually, to be strict, I'd say this advice is tailored to people who've had hemorrhagic stroke in the parietal lobe…
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My washing machine refreshed my thinking on software estimation
I recently had a saga with a washing machine that reminded me why one of the most feared and hated tasks for software developers starts with the question: “So how long will it take you to build that?”
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Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
arXiv’s computer science (CS) category has updated its moderation practice with respect to review (or survey) articles and position papers. Before being…
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Collaboration sucks
If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go alone too. (mostly)
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Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We …
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Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity
I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying. I like the premise of it, don’t get me wrong, a resume you don’t need to update all that often seems cool. Unfortunately though, its turned into the worst possible version of itself. It’s a place where people post
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A messy experiment that changed how I think about AI code analysis
A messy experiment that changed how we think about AI code analysis Last week, I watched our AI choke on a React codebase - again. As timeout errors flooded my terminal, something clicked. We’d been teaching AI to read code like a fresh bootcamp grad, not a senior developer. Here’s what I mean.
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War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged
All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.
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AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
AI was supposed to empower junior developers. In reality, it has become a tool that makes seniors more valuable while exposing the gaps in software culture.
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How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts
Here is a realization I made recently. I'm sitting in a room full of smart people. On one side are developers who understand the ins and outs of our microservice architecture. On the other are the fro
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Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)
Great mentors help, but purposeful tinkering and grit tend to forge the strongest software engineers.
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If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
A client once responded to one of my questions by saying, "Oh Greg, I am too busy living to think about life!” His off-the-cuff comment named a trap al ...
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Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (2016)
When the story of how I landed a job at Airbnb went viral, I was surprised at how infatuated people were with my negotiations. Media stories portrayed me as some kind of master negotiator—a wily ex...
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Sell yourself, sell your work
I've dealt with any number of technically brilliant people who produce outstanding work. The majority of them never bothered to write down their work and communicate it to others - report writing is too boring, uninteresting, and hard. And irrelevant. Or so they thought.
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Maybe you’re not trying
On selective agency in capable people
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Most technical problems are people problems
I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt - millions of lines of code, no unit tests, and products using l...
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Root for your friends
Heads‑up: The concept of this post might seem trivial, but it can improve your career, happiness, and the people you care about. Proceed without caution. It only takes about 10 minutes to read.
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The future of software development is software developers
Psst. If your boss won’t invest in training you in Specification By Example (BDD, ATDD), I’m running out-of-hours workshops on May 12 and 16 specifically for self-funding learners. £99 + UK VAT. I&…