Advice

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.

An addendum to a personal API

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

How should we value our work in a fair exchange?

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

Software Innovation and Business Models

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

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

How successful people manage information

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…