Writing declarative, readable and flexible React components using render props instead of HOCs Yes, I’m breaking up with higher order components in React. Mostly. I’d been seeing this other composition pattern on the side for a while. We met initially in some libraries like React Motion and the…

J ustin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook . But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of…

Facebook’s News Feed. LinkedIn’s 'Who’s Been Viewing Your Profile' feature. And now Twitter’s move toward 280 characters per tweet. Before these features saw the light of day, there were long debates. Take it from Twitter Group PM and Slack Director of Core Product Paul Rosania , who has made a…

The past five posts explored what it means to be a team, the five levels of teamwork, how to build performance, the four major team player types, and the four stages of team development. It’s important that leaders set the proper context–the atmosphere–for teamwork. Remember, team work is not an end…

“Cada cabeza es un mundo” — Street Art by Juegasiempre / DjLu in Bogotá, Colombia As an engineering leader, I value trust and believe that individual contributors should be involved in architectural and high level technical decision making. I consider every line of code to be a decision made on…

Las Vegas police stand guard along the streets outside the Route 91 Harvest Country music festival grounds on Sunday. David Becker/Getty Images Implicit in all political coverage by the media is the belief that political actors matter. That what they say and do shapes the larger landscape of…

Last night, the United States experienced the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. At least 58 people are dead and over 500 more wounded. No, that’s not a typo: More than 500 people were injured in one single incident. As tens of thousands enjoyed a music festival on the streets of…

T here were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into…

Now is exactly the time to talk about climate change, and all the other systemic injustices — from racial profiling to economic austerity — that turn disasters like Harvey into human catastrophes. Turn on the coverage of the Hurricane Harvey and the Houston flooding and you’ll hear lots of talk…

MITCH MCCONNELL was visibly distraught after the Republicans’ “skinny repeal” of Obamacare was defeated in the Senate, but he was not too out of sorts to get in a dig at Europe. The majority leader wondered acidly what ideas Democrats might have for fixing American health insurance, and noted that…

When employees don’t trust managers to make good decisions or to behave with integrity, their motivation is seriously compromised. Their distrust and its attendant lack of engagement is a huge, unrecognized problem in most organizations. This issue has always mattered, but it matters now more than…

At The New York Times we have a number of different systems that are used for producing content. We have several Content Management Systems, and we use third-party data and wire stories. Furthermore, given 161 years of journalism and 21 years of publishing content online, we have huge archives of…

I wrote a book on using OKRs called Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results Get it on Amazon or Gumroad As well, I run OKR workshops to get you started if you want to adopt this powerful technique. Contact me. Cwodtke eleganthack.com The OKR approach to…

It’s one of the biggest pieces that will make or break us as we try to become a great company, and I only recently realized it. We’ve been back and forth a number of times about the topic of feedback, and it’s an area where we still have a lot of work to do to get right. People often say, “You have…

Bethanye McKinney Blount has a very particular set of skills, skills that she’s acquired over a very long career. But unlike Taken ’s Bryan Mills , her ability as a “fixer” extends to corralling troublemakers at technology companies. That guy who decides to rewrite an entire system in his off-hours…

The origins of Luna Asana product vision When developing the initial Asana application, cofounders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein imagined a web app that was as easy to use as paper. The early vision for Asana was that users could create and update tasks at the speed of thought and share…

If you’ve spent any time looking into Google’s “Accelerated Mobile Pages” ( AMP ) project , I’m sure you’ll agree: it’s wonderful to hear the AMP team talk about how using their framework (and hosting the output on servers owned or approved by Google ) creates faster sites, and happier users. Few…

What I’m about to tell you is the most painful, traumatic, outrageous, outlandish, over-the-top story of government sanctioned police brutality, wrongful imprisonment, wrongful convictions, forced testimony, widespread corruption, money, lots of money, and deep, deep, deep soul-snatching…

The crew over at Tilde started the year with a new somewhat uncommon policy: new parents (mothers or fathers) could bring their immobile infants to work with them. Your new little one was (is!) welcome to tag along to work until six months, or until they start crawling. The first baby started…

A fellow I admire just asked me why it’s so easy to be a bad manager. Goddamn, that’s a fantastic question. I made some bonehead moves myself yesterday, so I’m in the perfect position to answer this one. Because I didn’t want to overthink my answer, I told him I’d write something up this afternoon…

I t had been a long night for Shanta Sweatt. After working a 16-hour shift cleaning the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, in Nashville, and then catching the 11:15 bus to her apartment, she just wanted to take a shower and go to sleep. Instead, she wound up having a fight with the man she refers to…

Women invented the field. Then men pushed them out of it. In this week’s mashup episode of Scandal: Silicon Valley , James Damore, a newly-fired Google engineer , wrote a 10-page memo arguing that the company’s efforts to improve diversity were misguided. Damore based his thesis on ideas from…

We do a lot of interviewing at Triplebyte. Indeed, over the last 2 years, I've interviewed just over 900 engineers. Whether this was a good use of my time can be debated! (I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat and doubt it.) But regardless, our goal is to improve how engineers are hired. To that end,…

When I read over the report on Uber’s workplace culture by former Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm , I felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, which probably isn’t uncommon for any woman who’s experienced sexual harassment and discrimination in the tech industry. The formula is almost…

In the wake of a terrorist attack in London earlier this month, a U.S. congressman wrote a Facebook post in which he called for the slaughter of “radicalized” Muslims. “ Hunt them, identify them, and kill them,” declared U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican. “Kill them all. For the sake of…

This was a talk I gave at an internal R&D conference my last week at Workiva. I got a lot of positive feedback on the talk, so I figured I would share it with a wider audience. Be warned: it’s long. Feel free to read each section separately, though they largely tie together. Why do you work where…

You Are Not Google Software engineers go crazy for the most ridiculous things. We like to think that we’re hyper-rational, but when we have to choose a technology, we end up in a kind of frenzy — bouncing from one person’s Hacker News comment to another’s blog post until, in a stupor, we float…

America has a pretty obvious problem preventing incidents where someone walks into a crowded area and starts shooting everyone in sight. A big part of that problem is that, at least when the person doing the shooting is white, we’re oddly reluctant to call these incidents acts of terrorism. Instead,…

T he “10x engineer” is a lead in the cast of characters for prevailing Silicon Valley mythos. Get a team of them and you could create the next billion dollar company. When WhatsApp was acquired it had 450 million monthly users, but just 32 engineers. Facebook acquired only 13 engineers when it…

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed. Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a…

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement imprisons more than 10,000 parents of American citizens in California each year, according to a report released today by Human Rights Watch. The report, entitled “I Still Need You,” analyzes the impact of immigration enforcement policy on immigrant families in…

Here is the english version of my now famous “Fallait demander” ! Thanks Una from unadtranslation .com for the translation 🙂 Advertisements

Discord has seen tremendous growth. To handle this growth, our engineering team has had the pleasure of figuring out how to scale the backend services. One piece of technology we’ve seen great success with is Elixir’s GenStage. The perfect storm: Overwatch and Pokémon GO This past summer, our mobile…

Published on May 13, 2017 SALISBURY, Md. — Two hours before sunrise, Dee Matello joined the line outside the Wicomico Civic Center, where hundreds of people in hoodies, heavy coats and wool blankets braced against a bitter wind. Inside, reclining dental chairs were arrayed in neat rows across the…

The nation has spoken: weird useless $400 wi-fi enabled juicing company Juicero is the perfect symbol of Silicon Valley. So says the Washington Post: Juicero Shows What’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Thinking . So says TechCrunch, which calls Juicero “the absurd avatar of Silicon Valley hubris” . So…

A sample of the ransomware cyberattack on a laptop in Taipei, Taiwan, on Saturday. Ritchie B. Tongo/European Pressphoto Agency The path to a global outbreak on Friday of a ransom-demanding computer software (“ransomware”) that crippled hospitals in Britain — forcing the rerouting of ambulances,…

Getty Images As a computer science PhD student, I am a disciple of big data. I see no ground too sacred for statistics: I have used it to study everything from sex to Shakespeare , and earned angry retorts for these attempts to render the ineffable mathematical. At Stanford I was given, as a…

Sometimes, revolutions go backward. In the South, racist whites violently resisted the rise of black political power. AR Waud, Harper's Weekly /Library of Congress People deal with political trauma in different ways. After the 2016 election, yuppies who once scoffed at preppers found themselves…

If you asked me to describe the worst blind date ever, it would go something like this: We arrive at an abandoned warehouse for drinks. My date looks like a cross between John Malkovich and Britney Spears when she was struggling. I can tell I’m gonna need to get drunk to get through this. But first,…

Senior Engineers Reduce Risk If you read articles on career development in software, you’ll already know there are many things a senior engineer is not . They are not, for instance, just someone with ten years of experience. They are not just someone who maintains a popular open source project. They…