Bookmarks

...there’s much more to deliberate practice than 10,000 hours. Read this to learn how to accelerate your learning, overcome the “OK” plateau, turn experience into expertise, and enhance your focus.

the biggest difference between an occasional contributor and a core developer lies in the knowledge about the physical architecture of the project. Roughly, it takes 2x more time to write a patch if you are unfamiliar with the project, but it takes 10x more time to figure out where you should change the code.

Cryptography can be a hard subject to understand. It’s full of mathematical proofs. But unless you are actually developing cryptographic systems, much of that complexity is not necessary to understand what is going on at a high level.

Say, the first generation works on thing X. After X is done and becomes popular, time passes and the next generation of programmers comes and works on Y, based on X. They do not need to know, exactly, how X is built, why it was built that way, or how to write an alternative X from scratch.

On a spectrum from Homer Simpson to Albert Einstein, how much of a genius-level move was it really for Carmack to add binary space partitioning to Doom?

Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest...It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction.

Progress is exponential, not linear. So we overestimate the impact of a new technology during the early days when it is just finding its feet, then underestimate its impact in a decade or so when its full uses are emerging.

In this post I'm going to introduce you to the basics of memory allocation...At the end of this post, you should know everything you need to know to write your own allocator.

Even though there is a lot of circulation online about making a personal SWOT analysis, the majority of the information is mainly focused on helping corporations. That’s why I decided to make a less complicated guide to help individuals do the following: Figure out what you’re good at and at the same time spot what you suck at so you can focus on the former.

You should consider yourself over a lifetime not as a single person, but a line of many people with different views and priorities.

You are a transaction.

The goal of this article is to provide a historical context of how JavaScript tools have evolved to what they are today in 2017.

To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:

Analytics have allowed me to double-down on artistic weirdness. They also pull me towards getting you addicted to the screen.

It is difficult to count how widely CSS is used, but the number of HTML pages that does not use CSS is probably not more than a few percent. Many people make their living as CSS designers or from CSS conferences. And the number of books written about CSS can no longer be counted.

Connecting with a book is so much about being the right reader in the right place at the right time. You have to feel free to skip things, move on, and maybe even come back later. And you have to feel free to say, 'It wasn’t for me.'

You should, intentionally and tactically, decide which piece of information you can do without, for now. But you should also, intentionally and strategically, decide when to pay back that debt.

Every senior person in an organisation should be aware of the less glamorous - and often less-promotable - work that needs to happen to make a team successful. Managed deliberately, glue work demonstrates and builds strong technical leadership skills. Left unconscious, it can be career limiting. It can push people into less technical roles and even out of the industry.

In this post, I'll walk you through everything you need to know about logs, including what is log and how to use logs for data integration, real time processing, and system building.

It’s counterintuitive, but once you understand it, you’ll have deeper insight into the behavior not just of CPUs and database thread pools, but also grocery store checkout lines, ticket queues, highways – really just a mind-blowing collection of systems.

Yet, while most of those QBasic concepts are today generally considered as red flags by our peers, they each served a very specific purpose at the time: to keep the language simple and accessible, a notion that every other language has left behind in favor of flexibility, complexity and logic.

Almost all culture, old or new, is designed for consumption by people under 40.

...once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire—that’s why you chose that platform after all—it’s time to look for your breakthrough. Suddenly your work starts to get noticed.

This paper is simply an amuse-bouche on the repeated patterns of computing that leverage immutability. Climbing up and down the compute stack really does yield a sense of déjà vu all over again.

Why We Want Things We Don’t Need — And What to Do About It

The problem with permission is that you are implicitly asking someone else to take some responsibility for your decision. You aren’t inviting them to participate in its success...

This isn’t going to be some rah-rah, pumped-up motivational speech. Instead, we’re going to break down the science behind how to get motivated in the first place and how to stay motivated for the long-run.

But there is an alternative. You can use your constraints to drive creativity. You can embrace your limitations to foster skill development. The problem is rarely the opportunities we have, but how we use them.

This is one of these situations where adopting a different perspective immediately results in superior outcomes. Few uses of the term 'paradigm shift' are actually legitimate, but this one is. It’s a lightbulb moment.

A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.

In a world of more requests than we can possibly fulfill, learning how to say no with grace and style is a skill we all need...We say yes too quickly and no too slowly.

...once you move past the simplified, Cliff Notes version of the OODA Loop, you find that it’s actually pretty heady stuff. It’s not “groundbreaking” in the sense of revealing insight never before conceived; rather, its power is in the way it makes explicit, that which is usually implicit

Buddhist philosophy is full of contradictions. Now modern logic is learning why that might be a good thing

...factors that are easiest to measure or model are not necessarily the most important ones and/or a complete picture, but human nature often forgets this.

...no matter how much I spun, nothing about my situation ever changed. I worked my week, got to the end of it, and had nothing to show. The next week there would be more emails and more tickets, exactly like the week before. The week after that would be more of the same. And absolutely nothing about my life would change. I'd end the week with nothing.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have.

In this post, I’m going to introduce you to the concept of Linux network namespaces.

Please Don't Say Just Hello In Chat

The other trouble with the promise that you can be anything is that you can spend a lifetime trying to be anything, forgetting that you actually already are something.