Watching Novak Djokovic play tennis is a pure delight, but I love listening to him talk about tennis even more. He’s the GOAT – a perfectly tuned machine with a deeply intrinsic sophist…
Standing on the shoulders of giants: Colm on constant work
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.
The 100 Best Bits of Advice Ever Shared on First Round Review
We combed The Review archives for a special compilation of the 100 very best advice published on our digital pages over the last 10 years from folks like Stewart Butterfield, Claire Hughes Johnson and Alexis Ohanian.
10 hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job
Last weekend I had a chance to talk with some students who just got their degree. They are pursuing their first software engineer job. In conversation with them, I learned that they have a pretty wrong perception of this job. This is because the reality for these new kids is so skewed.
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.
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 ...
Creating And Maintaining A Voice Of Customer Program — Smashing Magazine
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.
What are the major management behaviors that can help build trust? Management books often cover the importance of trust, but abstractly. There’s precious little writing about the nuts and bolts, the day-to-day tasks of trust-building. That’s the gap I’d like to try to fill with this article.
All of the writing I did in a week as a software engineer
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
’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…