Steve Yegge is shooting videos about working at big tech companies. Nerds of a certain age may fondly remember Steve Y's blog rants (and, more recently, Medium rants), in which he wrote about working...
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Holy moly. PC/GEOS, that OS I was documenting as my first "real job" out of school, is still kicking around… and its owners open-sourced it. Behold the news and the github repo. Thanks to Morg...
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"Incrediby Excited"
Startups are risky; I got laid off from Token.io this morning. I'm not in a rush to find my next job (but if you're about to tell me something that would change my mind, then by all means go ahead)....
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Book Report: Orbiting the Giant Hairball
In theory, this is a book of anecdotes about a creative person surviving/thriving in the bureaucracy of the Hallmark company. Mostly it seemed like anecdotes from someone overly anxious about authori...
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Book Report: Progress Principle
This book's cover is misleading; the book is good, but I almost returned it to the library without bothering to read it. The cover shows a Post-It attached by a thumbtack, which seems like the resul...
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GEOS-SC vs SC-GEOS
If you worked at Geoworks, you might remember that one of our products was GEOS-SC, an operating system for early-days smartphones. And you might remember that in Japan, the GEOS trademark was held ...
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The Sawzall programming language has been replaced by Go? That means some documentation I worked on back in the day has gone obsolete. The fate of a software technical writer: Here tells the truth on...
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Book Report: Give and Take
This book makes the case that you can behave nicely and still get ahead in business. Is this surprising? Does this need saying? Maybe; the author says that many folks don't think they can give others...
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Link: Double Fine Adventure!
I've been watching this serial documentary about how a computer game got made. It distills the thrill and the angst of game development. I've mentioned it before, but back then to see the videos, you...
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Book Report: Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies
It's like a pattern language for software development organizations. This isn't a design pattern language; it's more of a catalog of emergent patterns. You will encounter these situations as you make...
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Book Report: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Real-life Tech CEO worst case scenarios from Ben Horowitz. What to do when there's no clever fix for the company's problems. Choosing the least-bad of awful choices. Layoffs. Failures. Perhaps this b...
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It wasn't the BUILD Dictionary
Correction. I said that Bazel's BUILD Encyclopedia used to be the BUILD Dictionary. A Googler gently corrected me: But in fact, it was the encyclopedia back then as well. : ) I apologize for the ...
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Book Report: Creatvity, Inc.
It's a book about risk-taking at Pixar. If you're creating new things, you're taking risks: some of those new things won't work right. They almost certainly won't work right on the first try; you'll ...
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Book Report: Managing people across cultures
This book tells Human Resources folks how to take company culture into account when setting company policy for, e.g., performance reviews. That is: there's no one-size-fits-all policy that makes sens...
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"Incredibly Excited"
Today was my last day at Twitter. I even took a traditional Twitter turning-in-my-laptop-and-badge photo: I think this is a first for me: Quitting one job without the next job lined up. My upcomin...
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That "Moon" movie was "a Liberty Films production in association with Xingu". Trying to remember if I ever worked on a phone OS software project with code names Liberty and Xingu. Or if that was two...
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Book Report: Hatching Twitter
(Have I mentioned lately that I don't speak for my employer? This would be a good time to mention that. I read this book about Twitter's history. It tells a fairly sad story. Sad enough such that I f...
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Book Report: Things a Little Bird Told Me
It's an autobiography by Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, co-founder of Jelly. At the start, it talks about crazy risks he took. Some of which, in hindsight, still seem pretty risky… Some of ...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Arlequin Cafe in San Francisco's Hayes Valley
Some scribbled notes about GCing at #terngame14, a.k.a., Twitter's internal puzzlehunt. ...
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Are you a Seattle-area computer programmer? Do I know you? Do you not work for Google, for which I'm still in the no-poaching time-frame? Would you like to be hounded by yet more recruiters, as long ...
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