Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

"Don't try to make a career out of optimizing the SQL queries to display a preference page on a line of business app at a company that no one has ever heard of. That is not the straightforward path to having other people learn you are capable of doing meaningful work." This is so sad. Optimizing that SQL might require being really clever and can bring enormous value for the company that maybe nobody heard about but might be providing…

The disparity between the U.S. and Belgium is huge: I have a nice GitHub public profile. I am a capable and experienced Python and Haskell developer. I am building Reesd (https://reesd.com), a redundant storage service made of: - Several Docker containers, linked through Open vSwitch, - Web frontend, - SCP reimplementation with account permissions and bucket plan limits, and on-the-fly SHA1 check, - Redundant backend store, - Background jobs to check files SHA1 to detect early corruption, - Payment done…

It's interesting how different this reads almost a decade later. The advice contained within is generally good advice, but I can't help but notice how my peers who have most aggressively embraced these concepts haven't been my favorites to work with. The companies with cultures that reward these behaviors have also been some of my least favorite to deal with. Specifically, comments like "optimize for impact and visibility" and "prefer working on things you can show" are the kind of…

Four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7179098 But that's not criticism. This is a really good and valuable article for creative professionals to read, and absorb.