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Joel Spolsky, "Things You Should Never Do, Part I": https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
It seems like common sense, but every few months I need a reminder that I should prefer to incrementally refactor/re-architect the codebase I have, rather than start from scratch.
I wish I had seen that (or if I had seen it before just remembered that) a few months ago. I work on an internal project that is core to part of our business and we are on our 3rd iteration of our platform in less than a year. An when I say iteration, I mean from scratch re-write. I will say it was probably necessary to go from the first to second platform with a re-write because the first one was half baked and didn't do much of what was needed. However, the 2nd to 3rd platform was not necessary and like Joel says, could have been refactored instead of scrapped entirely. Our QA person was super pissed too since they had put in so much time and effort into creating test cases for the platform we had and now they are completely wasted. Not to mention, because we are writing the newest iteration from scratch we missed deadlines because we had to deal with more than just business knowledge (which the team lacks as all but one of us is new to the specific domain in the health care realm) but putting together a new platform that could be extensible (just like the previous version of it was supposed to be) for future clients and outputs.
Not exactly a blogpost, but this is Randy Pausch's last lecture about achieving your childhood dreams. He was a CS professor at Carnegie Mellon, who passed away roughly a decade ago. I watch it from time to time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo
Oh yes !
There is also a book, quite short but there are some things that are not in the lecture. Good read
This! This! This!
It has nothing to do with programming but I find myself rereading Smedley Butler's essay, "War is a Racket", quite often:
https://archive.org/stream/WarIsARacket/WarIsARacket_djvu.tx...
What You Can't Say
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
This response to someone on StackOverflow asking how to parse HTML with regex: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/145684
I used to love this answer but after I realised that it's same irrational peddling of best practices as "don't-use-goto". There can be many cases where parsing HTML with Regex is abuse, but equally others where it's the best available solution. I wasted countless hours in working with lame HTML libraries, their limited options for selectors, their frustrating failures with invalid HTML, all because of this advice. Looking back, I think Regex would have worked just fine.
Jay Kreps’ article on the log abstraction - https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...
I've had this open in my browser for about two years now. I've read it maybe 1.5 times and I know I want to re-read it, but it's so long that I rarely actually get to it.
If you enjoy the subject, these two are good reads as well: - https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-world-beyond-batch-streami... - https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-world-beyond-batch-streami...
Joel Spolsky - "Strategy Letter V". The article serves as an economics primer for any individual(though its much more relevant to software developers). Key Takeaway-- commoditize your products complement
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
What should a four-year old know?
https://magicalchildhood.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/what-shoul...
It's common for parents to be daunted by the fact that their kids are being left behind. This fear leads to high-pressure parenting and its symptoms are much worse in an Indian society (in which I grew up). What kids need more is freedom to explore their own interests and inquisitiveness rather than forced lessons. I keep revisiting this article to remind myself what kids needs the most to grow.
Richard Hamming: You and Your Research
If you like this, I highly recommend Hamming's book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering. This is the write-up of a graduate course he taught at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. There is also a complete set of video recordings of his lectures from his 1995 teaching of that course on YouTube [1].
The talk You and Your Research is actually the final chapter/lecture in the book/course.
I can't personally recommend the lectures, since I have not watched them, but I have carefully read the book and taken notes: it is pure gold.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30
Same here, I read it at least once a year.
How to make wealth by PG http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Why Amazon has no profits and why it works by A16Z https://a16z.com/2014/09/05/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-wh...
(NSFW) "The Others" I keep it in a bookmark with the title "never forget". It is in French but it is mostly for the pictures of civilian victims in Syria.
https://making-of.afp.com/les-autres
Remember how privileged we are. Remember how quickly these privileges can go away. Remember how unfair the world is.
Focus on what is important. Focus on life. Yours and others.
Paul Graham's essay What you can't say was one of the most enlightening pieces I've ever read. It makes a strong case that whatever your current ethics are, some of them will look strange or even barbaric to people in the future, just as the beliefs of many compassionate rational people living 100, 500 or 1,000 years ago do to you. Then it talks about root causes of moral fashions and what you can do to discover what heresies you might unconsciously believe but be unable to speak without serious repercussions.
From this vantage point 13 years later, there are specific parts of the essay that are objectionable now, and yet that reinforces rather than refutes the core thrust of the essay.
I always find it stimulating to read
How to do Research At the MIT AI Lab [1] and Where's the Passion [2].
[1]: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41487 [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093808/
David Chapman, the author of "How to do Research at the MIT AI Lab" is currently writing a book on meta-rationality over at meaningness.com. Highly recommended.
A taste from the blog outside of the book: https://meaningness.com/metablog/stem-fluidity-bridge
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant
Luigi Rossolo's The Art of Noise, a 1913 futurist manifesto that talks about how people adapt to technology, and that defines their aesthetic sensibilities (and predicts electronic/industrial music).
http://www.artype.de/Sammlung/pdf/russolo_noise.pdf
Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians has gotten multiple re-readings (it's a short book/very long essay, but is published free online) and has given me great insight into the attitudes behind the right-wing populists currently dominating politics in the West:
Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls
http://bookofhook.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/smart-guy-productiv...
14 years ago: the day Teller gave me the secret to my career in magic
http://shwood.squarespace.com/news/2009/9/21/14-years-ago-th...
8 Years Today - Paul Buchheit
It's a very personal post about death & loss & mourning. It helped me navigate through a tough time.
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2012/03/eight-years-today.h...
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
"The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems."
I personally think this is an profoundly important piece of writing.
aka - "scratch that itch"
Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns, Steve Yegge: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.au/2006/03/execution-in-king...
Not tech related, but helped me realise how we subconsciously view others and ourselves:
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s...
Let's Build a Compiler by Jack Crenshaw.[1] It's not really the content that I enjoy, rather the form of instruction. To exaggerate, I'm sure that someone who had never touched programming in their life could learn how to write a compiler from this work.
Scott Adams, "The Day You Became A Better Writer", 2007
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/the_...
You and Your Research by Hamming
http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
It’s just spectacular in a way that is hard to summarize. My favorite part is the lesson about closed vs open doors.
I want to mention 2 of my all time favorite articles -
1. How language influences emotion - https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/the-book-...
2. The Kekule Problem - http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem
Both of them very thought provoking and excellent articles.
How to Be Polite, by Paul Ford:
https://medium.com/message/how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c
Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Systems for Decision Making, Habits, Honesty and More:
https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/...
audio: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/02/naval-ravikant-read...
"This Is Water" speech, by David Wallace.
I find myself going back to "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" by Joel Spolsky.
It's the basics that I forget often...
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...
Richard P. Gabriel, "The Rise of Worse is Better"
Meditations on Moloch. In which coordination problems are incarnated as Ginsberg's Moloch. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Start Now. No Funding Needed. by Derek Sivers
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
Epigrams on Programming -- Alan Perlis
Ada Palmer's "On Progress and Historical Change" https://www.exurbe.com/?p=4041
"So when I tell people about this election, and they ask me “Does it always have the same outcome?” the answer is yes and no. Because the Great Forces always push the same way. The strong factions are strong. Money is power. Blood is thicker than promises. Virtue is manipulable. In the end, a bad man will be pope. And he will do bad things. The war is coming, and the land — some land somewhere — will burn. But the details are always different. A Cardinal needs to gather fourteen votes to get the throne, but it’s never the same fourteen votes, so it’s never the same fourteen people who get papal favor, whose agendas are strengthened, whose homelands prosper while their enemies fall. And I have never once seen a pope elected in this simulation who did not owe his victory, not only to those who voted, but to one or more of the humble functionaries, who repeated just the right whisper at just the right moment, and genuinely handed the throne to Monster A instead of Monster B. And from that functionary flow the consequences."
Julia Evans' Linux Debugging Zine: https://jvns.ca/debugging-zine.pdf
The mythical 10x programmer - antirez
http://antirez.com/news/112
this was posted on HN a month or two ago, but I've read it several times and has motivated me to avoid mindless consumption of media and instead create stuff.
https://www.sophiaellis.co/blog/the-world-belongs-to-those-w...