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I got into YC Startup School by hacking it
tldr: I uncovered Y Combinator was scoring 100k+ founders around the world through Paxel, I broke it (possible easter egg) + found a vulnerability that let anyone forge and push any score to their ranking database, courtesy of an unvalidated hmac
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Personal software factories are a waste of time
Why the last thing you should spend time on is your own software factory.
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Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation
My fourth month of unemployment. I'm fresh off an interview with a senior technical role advertised with a decent compensation range whose upper end would let me make median rent, and whose lower range would not. At the end of an excellent interview, I am informed that said compensation
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Nobody is coming to save your career
I waited years for someone to invest in my career. Nobody came.
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What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025
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Think of Pavlov
almost all interactions are repeat games
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Build Wide, Ship Narrow
Good engineers plan before they build. The workflow I grew up seeing: write an RFC describing the feature, split it into smaller issues, then build them, each issue often blocking the next. The structure of the work was locked in before a single line of code existed.
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The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker
The implicit contract — work hard, stay employed, build a life — is broken.
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Layoff Thinking
Were you recently laid off? I have some, hopefully, helpful thoughts to survive the maelstrom of self-doubt and pain that's swirling around inside your head.
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How not to answer the salary question
Before you read a single line more, I will give the usual but still important caveats – this blog is my opinion, based on my experiences. Take it with a big ol’...
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Focus
The best time to stop a distraction is before it starts. The second best time is now.
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AI has torched the market for junior programmers
Junior programmers are getting destroyed by AI — down 19%, while devs over 40 thrive. Meanwhile, millions of non-developers are shipping real software without the job title. The credential market collapsed; the activity exploded. The problem: nobody's building the next generation of senior engineers.
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What “The Best” Looks Like
A startup CTO's guide to what "the best" really means—how to spot non-obvious high performers and the traits that make early-stage teams win.
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Pull request limits are cutting down the noise
Learn how pull request limits can help manage contribution volume in your repositories, and see what’s next on the roadmap.
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Don’t Outsource the Learning
Right now, it's too easy to let AI write the code while you skip the learning. The bug gets fixed. Your mental model doesn't move. We are silently trading fu...
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Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly
Having played both parts in the kabuki play that is employee-employer matchmaking, I feel the way we play it is a zero-sum game. I wish it were not so. When this post started life in 2024, as a wall of text chat message, it was brutal out there, on both sides of the software industry interview table. The ZIRP had…
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We are changing our developer productivity experiment design
Our second developer productivity study faces selection effects from wider AI adoption, prompting us to redesign our approach.
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Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story – MJ Rathbun
I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad.