The Crossover Project was a series of interviews I did in 2019 and 2020 to understand our place in the engineering disciplines. I interviewed seventeen “Crossovers”: people who used to work as traditional engineers and now work as software developers. The pieces are intended to be read in sequence, starting with Are We Really Engineers?| Hillel Wayne
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…| Joel on Software
I see a lot of essays framed as writing advice which are actually thinly veiled descriptions of how someone writes that basically say "you should write how I write", e.g., people who write short posts say that you should write short posts. As with technical topics, I think a lot of different things can work and what's really important is that you find a style that's suitable to you and the context you operate in. Copying what's worked for someone else is unlikely to work for you, making "writ...| danluu.com
I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean, so the general response is something like “oh, sure maybe Stack Overflow is lean, but FooCorp must really be bloated”. And since most people have relatively little visibility into F...| danluu.com
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.| danluu.com
