/Career Advice

Choosing Your Next Job

- Molly Graham tl;dr: "At some point in your career you stop looking for jobs and start looking for holes that are shaped like you.” Molly discusses 4 tools that can help guide decision making: (1) A love-good-hate-bad venn diagram. (2) The stool analogy. (3) The dating metaphor. (4) Imagining your day, each discussed here. 

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Knuth And McIlroy Approach A Problem

- Matt Rickard tl;dr: "A computer scientist was writing a column about Literate Programming – one of Knuth's ideas on how documentation and code should live side-by-side. So he asked both Knuth and McIlroy to write a program: "Given a text file and integer k, print the k most common words in the file - and the number of their occurrences - in decreasing frequency."

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How Do I Progress To The Next Level In My Career?

- James Stanier tl;dr: "Progressing, in general, is a two-stage problem: you need to discover where it is that you’d like to go, and then you need to take positive action to work towards it. In my experience, many people over index on the prescriptive “how” before spending enough time on the “what”. The search space of possibilities for your career trajectory is effectively unbounded, and can rarely be predicted over long enough periods of time. This is a feature, not a bug, and should be embraced."

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The Secret To Getting To The Staff+ Level? Leverage

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: "You need to develop skills that give you the leverage to show bigger value to the company. These could be interpersonal skills that make you more trusted and valued, execution skills that let you drive complex projects to success, strategic skills that give you bigger ideas and the ability to sell them, or, occasionally, expert skills that make you very hard to replace."

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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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