I used to be a lifehacking addict, and in some ways I still am. I have a perverse love of systems and efficiency: analyzing, configuring, optmizing, categorizing, defining, and parameter-setting. (I’m the son of two librarians, one of whom also worked as an unofficial programmer/sysadmin. I guess…

Gelmy Tun Borgos helps in the kitchen making tortillas with her mother in their home in a small village in the Yucatan. Adriana Zehbrauskas for NPR Fifteen years ago, psychologists Barbara Rogoff and Maricela Correa-Chavez ran a simple experiment. They wanted to see how well kids pay attention —…

Here are 39 ways to make your blog more entertaining to read and more pleasurable to write. Confidence Don’t begin by telling the reader why you wrote your piece - tell them why they should read it, and then do your best to prove yourself right. If you’re wondering whether you should write a piece…

Step into an American preschool classroom today and you are likely to be bombarded with what we educators call a print-rich environment, every surface festooned with alphabet charts, bar graphs, word walls, instructional posters, classroom rules, calendars, schedules, and motivational platitudes—few…

Dudes like me ain’t supposed to talk about this type of stuff. I’m about to tell you some real shit. Things I haven’t told anybody. But first, we gotta go back in time. We gotta go back to when the NBA was still the NBA. Way back when I had the pager with the two-way alert. I’m about to tell you the…

Camille Fournier 3 min read· Sep 22, 2018 -- I’m often asked about the characteristics of great engineering managers. This is a question that almost always has a long answer that involves “well, she’s good at X, and he’s good at Y, and then there’s Z…” Every management role is slightly different,…

I've been on both sides of interviewing for a while now. As a candidate - for 9 years, and as an interviewer - for 90 interviews. (What a beautiful round number!) So I decided to write down questions which I usually ask the company when considering their position. These questions help me to…

The most interesting migration I ever participated in was Uber’s migration from Puppet-managed services to a fully self-service provisioning model where any engineer at the company could spin up a new service in two clicks. Not only could they, they did, provisioning multiple services each day by…

A few uncomfortable truths, and keys for success, for people who build software. Illustration by Stephen Carlson Estimating how much time and effort it will take to build or fix software isn’t easy, and most people are really bad at it. The more senior you get in your career building software: The…

Cindy Sridharan 40 min read· Dec 31, 2017 -- Author’s Note: Thanks, as ever, to Fred Hebert, for reading a draft of this post and making some sterling suggestions. This is the first installment in my series on testing distributed systems. The posts in this series are the following: Testing…

Say you have a problem child. If it’s a toddler, maybe he smacks his siblings. Or she refuses to put on her shoes as the clock ticks down to your morning meeting at work. If it’s a teenager, maybe he peppers you with obscenities during your all-too-frequent arguments. The answer is to punish them,…

Verification and identity Fraud prevention Alerts and notifications Appointment reminders Lead alerts Mass texting Marketing and promotions SMS marketing Cross-sell and upsell Optimize ad spend Support and sales IVR Contact center Customer data management Developers Data Engineering Marketing…

Children need both affection and structure in order to develop into secure, happy adults. But if parents can only provide one, it should be structure, said Lisa Damour, a psychologist who specializes in adolescent girls, and the author of Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven…

Ryan McGeehan 9 min read· Dec 20, 2016 -- This year (2016) I accepted as much incident response work as I could. I spent about 300 hours responding to security incidents and data breaches this year as a consultant or volunteer. This included hands on work with an in-progress breach, or coordinating…

For a while, it seemed like everyone was crazy for microservices. You couldn’t open up your favorite news aggregator of choice without some company you had never heard of touting how the move to microservices had saved their engineering organization. You may have even worked for one of those…

James Altucher 5 min read· Nov 18, 2016 -- Press enter or click to view image in full size I’ve been an employer. And I’ve been an employee. And I’ve been on the board of a staffing agency and advised dozens of other companies on hires. I’ve seen every salary negotiation possible. 99.9% of hires…

By 1918, Charles M. Schwab was one of the richest men in the world. Schwab was the president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the largest shipbuilder and the second-largest steel producer in America at the time. The famous inventor Thomas Edison once referred to Schwab as the “master hustler.” He…

image source Each week I share helpful ideas in my 10 Ideas Worth Sharing newsletter. Sign up here to get next week’s ideas. You’re busy, so I’ll keep this quick. Following are the simplest tips I can give you to easily — and forever — improve the quality of your writing. Delete the word “that.” At…

Sports Med . 2014; 44(Suppl 2): 117–125. Published online 2014 Oct 30. PMCID: PMC4213370 Functional Molecular Biology Lab, Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior, University of California Davis, One Shields Ave, 174 Briggs Hall, Davis, CA 95616 USA Keith Baar, Email: ude.sivadcu@raabk…

Chapter 1: “Inmates Run This Bitch” H ave you ever had a riot?” I ask a recruiter from a prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). “The last riot we had was two years ago,” he says over the phone. “Yeah, but that was with the Puerto Ricans!” says a woman’s voice, cutting in. “We…

You’ve probably seen articles detailing what Warren Buffett does every day, or what Elon Musk eats before noon, or that “one trait” rich people have that poor people don’t. It’s interesting, but when it comes to building wealth and success, these habits don’t teach you anything about what it really…

The first time I asked someone on a date, I had a mini panic attack. To this day I honestly don’t know if he said yes, I couldn’t hear him on the other end of the phone. As soon as I uttered those words “Wanna go out?” the adrenaline kicked in and all I could hear was the blood rushing through my…

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…

In 2007, Charlie Munger gave the commencement address at USC Law School, opening his speech by saying, “Well, no doubt many of you are wondering why the speaker is so old. Well, the answer is obvious: He hasn’t died yet.” Fortunately for us, Munger has kept on ticking. The commencement speech is an…

Slack — the team communication tool that is taking over the world — has become ubiquitous and obvious. But how did Slack, with all of its channels, private groups, direct messages and hashtags, go from zero to millions of users so quickly? For sure, there’s a lot of functionality in the product and…

How To Get Press for Your Startup: The Complete Guide There’s nothing a startup (or any company) needs quite as much as press. We can pretend like press doesn’t matter after we have it, but until then it brings in traffic, users, social validation and legitimacy all at the same time. Those are…

Every morning, designers wake up to happily work on their products, be they digital or physical, with an inner belief that people will want to use their products and will have a blast doing so. Perhaps that is a slight generalization; however, as designers, we tend to have a natural desire for each…