Facing death, these people found a clarity about how to live

I absolutely love reading. Fiction, non-fiction, poems, blogs, newspapers, magazines. Unfortunately, in today’s world, we spend less time reading and more time browsing—scrolling through Tweets, liking Instagram posts. It’s a shame, because reading offers many benefits that are backed by science. If you’re not convinced you should make it a habit, see below for some ... Read More

After making it through the initial application selection and conquering a first set of introductory interviews the interview process often moves on to some form of “technical challenges”. The goal…

Diving into the Staff Engineer Role, with Raviraj from Meta

The political economy of bullshit.

’Tis a gift to be simple. ALA’s Zeldman bemoans our industry’s current fetish for the needlessly complicated over the straightforward. Escape the cult of the complex! Get back to improving lives, o…

The other day, I was thinking about less-obvious skills that I find helpful for working as a software engineer. Some skills are obvious, like understanding technical topics, learning new things, and thinking like a computer, but there’s a separate class of unobvious skills that an outsider may not immediately think of when they imagine a career in software.1 Empathy and communication are the main ones that come to mind.2 3

How successful people manage information

The most important part of a companies culture is trust. People don't feel trusted when you micro-manage and this has disastrous implications.

June's CEO on how to move faster and stop throwing away your roadmaps

Software Innovation and Business Models

If you can't do nothing, then don't expect to be able to do something.

How should we value our work in a fair exchange?

Product teams benefit from knowing their users’ needs and how they respond to product updates as they build out the roadmap of a product. This article covers Voice of Customer programs and is aimed at those who work on a product team as well as executives who are looking for how to better inform your products using insight from users.

You start a new project. The pitch outlines the problem and boundaries of the solution. There's an appetite, like three weeks, that captures how much time it's worth investing. It's time to jump in. You add some to-dos. Have a kickoff call. Mock up a few approaches, throw together a dead simple UI, or spike a potential data model. All ...

It used to be that the best city for techies was clearly the Bay Area. Now, I think the best city is a bit further north.

The OpenAI drama has left a hole in the company’s upper echelons. Its remaining leaders now face a daunting task that every founder must reckon with: recruiting exceptional senior talent.

An addendum to a personal API

The Builders' Library gathers the expertise of Amazon's most experience builders in one place. One article that really got me thinking was Colm MacCárthaigh's "Reliability, constant work, and a good cup of coffee" which is about an anti-fragility pattern that he developed for building simple, more robust, and cost-effective systems.

And shouldn’t that be the case for starting anything?