Oliver Munday W hen the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a hea

Illustrations by Yulia Prokopova Translations: Korean I’m not an expert in hiring for big companies, but I have extensive experience for small ones and a bit of common sense. Back in 2013, I ran a hig

For more than 30 years, the Inuit welcomed anthropologist Jean Briggs into their lives so she could study how they raise their children. Briggs is pictured during a 1974 visit to Baffin Island. Jean B

The Kanban Method, as formulated by David J. Anderson, is an approach to incremental, evolutionary process and systems change for organizations. My layman’s way of describing Kanban is that it is a wa

Cindy Sridharan Aug 11, 2017 · 19 min read In this post, I aim to: — Shed light on some of the presumed benefits of small functions — Explain why I personally think some of the benefits don’t really p

Becoming a new manager isn’t merely a change in what you do — it’s a change in how you think. Don’t be fooled: Becoming a new manager is deceptively difficult. No matter how many leadership books you’

20 minute read The network stack does several seemingly-impossible things.It does reliable transmission over our unreliable networks, usually without any detectable hiccups.It adapts smoothly to network congestion.It provides addressing to billions of active nodes.It routes packets around damaged…

On the western edge of Frozen Head State Park, just before dawn, a man in a rust brown trench coat blows a giant conch shell. Runners stir in their tents. They fill their water pouches. They tape their blisters. They eat thousand-calorie breakfasts: Pop-Tarts and candy bars and geriatric energy…

In 8 easy steps Brad Armstrong Feb 19, 2018 “A barista pouring coffee into a mug that says ugh on it at Bar Nine” by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash Congratulations - you’re a new manager! No, really, I’m being sincere. You can hear the sarcasm in my voice? Sorry, I tried, but I know that along with some…

2017-06-28 It depends. The problem with distributed systems, is that no matter what the question is, the answer is inevitably ‘It Depends’. When you cut a larger service apart, where you cut depends on latency, resources, and access to state, but it also depends on error handling, availably and…

2018-05-14 Write code that’s easy to delete, and easy to debug too. Debuggable code is code that doesn’t outsmart you. Some code is a little to harder to debug than others: code with hidden behaviour, poor error handling, ambiguity, too little or too much structure, or code that’s in the middle of…

I Hate the News Some people start their day by reading The New York Times . Others end it by watching the nightly news. Some get it from The Daily Show . Others download it from a variety weblogs. Some keep up-to-the-minute by following CNN. Others have instant news updates automatically text…

Eight years ago, Games Done Quick started as a handful of sleep-deprived speedrunners unexpectedly crammed into owner Mike Uyama’s mom’s basement. Networking issues had forced them to abandon their planned location at MAGFest’s hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, so they improvised. Back then, the…

Is this you? Are you making other feel like this? Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. In 2006 we launched Campfire, the first modern SAAS group chat and messaging tool for business. Since then, quite a few business chat and messaging tools like…

“I get anxious about long interviews,” says Trent Reznor, smiling shyly from a leather couch at an empty hotel bar in Bakersfield, California, “but it’s nice to have a break from rehearsing the set and feeling suicidal about how much more work we have to do.” Sipping from an early-morning black…

Better. Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content . These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical. Each, in its own way, contributes to the imperative that we constantly expand our portfolio of shallow but strongly-held…

Transcript (Editor's note: transcripts don't do talks justice.This transcript is useful for searching and reference, but we recommend watching the video rather than reading the transcript alone!For a reader of typical speed, reading this will take 15% less time than watching the video, but you'll…

Today’s Daily Update, which follows up on yesterday’s Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II article on net neutrality regulation, is free for everyone. Good morning, Well, that was certainly something. First off, I appreciate all of your continued support — especially those of you who strongly disagreed…

Note: This post was previously titled “Why Ajit Pai is Right.” I have changed it to reflect my interest in a substantive debate, not flame-throwing. The article is unchanged (beyond normal edits). Weirdly, this article about the American broadband market must start in Portugal. Web has been…

There is no higher God in Silicon Valley than growth. No sacrifice too big for its craving altar. As long as you keep your curve exponential, all your sins will be forgotten at the exit. It’s through this exponential lens that eating the world becomes not just a motto for software at large, but a…

Penny Kim Aug 28, 2016 The mantra and the irony that will soon follow Telling my story isn’t going to be easy. Oftentimes I feel embarrassed, enraged, and regretful when I have to relive it, but in the end it is a story and life lesson which should be shared so that others may know major red flags…

Raw types.markdown This document has moved! It's now here , in The Programmer's Compendium.The content is the same as before, but being part of the compendium means that it's actively maintained. Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub . Already have an account? Sign in to comment

AP / The Atlantic What is the Islamic State ? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata,…

Idle Words > Talks > What Happens Next Will Amaze You This is the text version of a talk I gave on September 14, 2015, at the FREMTIDENS INTERNET conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Good morning! Today's talk is being filmed, recorded and transcribed, and everything I say today will leave an…

When he’s choosing your music for you, Carl Chery, 37, is in Culver City, California, sitting at his desk in an office with no signage, trying to decide whether Drake and Future’s “Jumpman” (jumpman, jumpman, jumpman) has jumped the shark. Or sometimes he’s at home in his one-bedroom apartment on…

Opinion Aziz Ansari: Why Trump Makes Me Scared for My Family Credit Jon Han “DON’T go anywhere near a mosque,” I told my mother. “Do all your prayer at home. O.K.?” “We’re not going,” she replied. I am the son of Muslim immigrants. As I sent that text, in the aftermath of the horrible attack in…

M orale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN. Their corner of the office is loud; their desks are scattered with…

An allegory? Sarcasm? Humorous pastiche? You decide. The fanatical proponents of baseball tell us that it is a very exciting game, fun to play and fun to watch. They are clearly either stupid or evil or both, because we tried baseball and it didn’t work. First of all, the requirements for the game…

Micropackages and Open Source Trust Scaling written on Thursday, March 24, 2016 Like everybody else this week we had funwith the pad-left disaster .We're from the Python community and our exposure to the node ecosystem isprimarily for the client side. We're big fans of the ecosystem thatdevelops…

CSUA alum Jonathan Blow talks about software quality at the Wozniak Lounge. Due to camera issues the video cuts between actual video footage at varying quality and audio+slides. A very special extra thanks to Jonathan for supplying the audio and slides so we could make the entire talk available.…

How can we fix the firing process if we're not even talking about it first? So here's my story, and everything I've learned from it. March 16 2016

At DigitalOcean, we are making some changes to the recruitment process of back-end developers. We simplified the job description and the interview process, and added a step that asks the candidate to write us some code. This is an account of my experience on hiring processes and their use of code…

The worst part of my job these days is designing APIs for front-end developers. The conversation goes inevitably as: Dev – So, this screen has data element x,y,z… could you please create an API with the response format {x: , y:, z: } Me – Ok I don’t even argue anymore. Projects end up with a…

(Part 1 of 2 posts) I’ve been percolating on this post for a long time. Thanks very much to Mark Burgess for reviewing early drafts of it. One of the ideas that permeates our field of web operations is that we can’t have enough automation. You’ll see experience with “building automation” on almost…

( This was originally posted on Sunday, March 11, 2007 ) I recently re-read the amazing paper Why Functional Programming Matters (“WhyFP”). Although I thought that I understood WhyFP when I first read it a few years ago, when I had another look last weekend I suddenly understood that I had missed an…

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a…

Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan's technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have…

#WEBSUMMIT2015 About 12 years ago, I co-founded a startup called Basecamp : A simple project collaboration tool that helps people make progress together, sold on a monthly subscription. It took a part of some people’s work life and made it a little better. A little nicer than trying to manage a…

Many years ago, when I first started to work in the advertising industry, we used to have this thing called The Overnight Test. It worked like this: My creative partner Laurence and I would spend the day covering A2 sheets torn from layout pads with ideas for whatever project we were currently…

Yann Kebbi COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to…