/Career Advice

Search Less, Browse More

- Hillel Wayne tl;dr: "My best explanation for this is that most people learn a tool through searching, not browsing. When you search, you’re trying to find information that solves your specific need. When you browse, you’re systematically going through information for learning or later lookup."

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Floating Point Math

tl;dr: "Your language isn’t broken, it’s doing floating point math. Computers can only natively store integers, so they need some way of representing decimal numbers. This representation is not perfectly accurate. This is why, more often than not, 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3."

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“Black Hole Words” And The Power Of Asking Stupid Questions

- Molly Graham tl;dr: Molly warns us of black hole words, which "are commonplace in a given industry but everyone has a slightly different definition of them. You can have a whole meeting and if you don’t define the word, you just wasted an hour of everyone’s time." Molly gives us examples, such as "values", "work-life balance", "impact" and "fast."

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The Many Flavors Of Hashing

- Ciprian Dorin Craciun tl;dr: "Very few hashing algorithms are usable in more than a couple of situations. Even worse, using the wrong algorithm will lead in the best case scenario to performance problems, but in the worst case scenario to security issues and even financial loss. Thus, knowing which algorithm to pick for which application is crucial."

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Thinking About The Costs Of A Software Feature

- Roland Weigelt tl;dr: (1) The work necessary for turning a rough sketch of an idea into a viable concept. (2) Time spent on planning the work. (3) Effort that goes into preparing the coding part of the development. (4) Time spent on writing the code. (5) Testing the software. (6) Documentation. And more. 

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How to Deliver Bad News

- Ed Batista tl;dr: 3 steps: (1) State what happened. The most important step is initiating the conversation. It's common to downplay bad news or share the bare minimum. (2) Provide an explanation for the cause. This may be embarrassing, particularly if your action or inaction was a contributing factor but trying to avoid acknowledging your embarrassment often makes it worse. (3) Here's what you're planning to do: this gives the other parties the benefit of your thinking while signaling your openness to theirs.

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Looking Back At Two Years At Automattic And Tumblr

- Vicki Boykis tl;dr: "For the past two years, I’ve been building and breaking recommender systems at Wordpress and Tumblr. I’m starting a new adventure soon, but this scope of work has been the most meaningful and fun of my career so far, and I wanted to reflect on a few things I’m taking away." Vicki discusses her takeaways about ML, people, culture, communication, and the joys of engineering. 

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Ergonomic Tips From A Full-Time Programmer

- Matyáš Racek tl;dr: (1) Get a standing desk. (2) Get a good keyboard. (3) Setup shortcuts or learn Vim the author shows us his AutoHotkey setting. (4) Ergonomic chairs don't really work. (5) Big monitor and big text. And more. 

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How To Estimate Disk Space

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will recalls one the best architecture interviews he's been in, "where the candidate was able to significantly narrow down the possible solutions by asking for a few details: queries per second, expected number of rows, and necessary columns." Will demonstrates how he would approach this question. 

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How To Present To Executives

tl;dr: "Presenting to executives can be intimidating, and this might be more advice than helpful. If you want to boil it all down to one concise tip: send an early draft to an executive attending the meeting and ask them what to change. If you listen to and apply that feedback, you’ll figure out the other pieces as you go." Will also provides a framework to use, as well as other tips. 

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