Sweet merciful Jesus, I woke up this morning and my inbox was flooded with horrific stories about how employers treat people. I knew things were fucked, but this was so much worse than I imagined, and that's not even getting into the comments on Hackernews. I am going to dig into some of those emails, but first... I...

I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons. Let's talk about why happened and why it's a disgrace that it was even possible. I. Background Let's...

This year, I've attended my first two large tech conferences. One was hosted by a trendy database vendor, and the other was a general tech conference in a non-hub that no one should know about. Despite some highlights, I would describe both experiences as "grotesque", "troubling", and "oily". Or, to quote a friend...

This is a list of all my favorite articles, accompanied by some brief discussion. I'd like to maintain a list like this somewhere to update periodically, along with the little notes, and notify readers if I've added anything particularly good. Let me know if you are aware of any good solutions for this at...

I woke up one morning this week to find out that we're YouTube famous now - my all-time favourite tech YouTuber, Primeagen, ended up reading my post on the social fiction of most organizations wanting to improve things on his stream. On one hand, senpai noticed me. On the other hand, senpai didn't agree with me. The...

With God as my witness, the next son of a bitch to mention Agile is going to get hurled into the ground so hard that I'm going to publish a seismology paper in Nature with the data. I. I Personally Find Stand-Ups Very Usefu- Stop. Those apologists who insist that Agile works very well for them - you can leave now...

There is a terrible fight going on. I. It is the terrible fight between a wolf that wants to do something halfway productive, and a lazy wolf that wants to chill out because his organization seems to only care about making dashboards no one reads, but they still provide that wolf as much meat as he wants. Which one...

Yesterday's post received a lot more attention than the regular ones do. There are plenty of things to talk about, ranging from my favourite comments (people telling me I'm right), the most useful comments (pointing out flaws in my thinking), and the funniest comments (Reddit fucking hates me and I think I love it)....

Last week, I had a fascinating conversation with a reader around frustration and unhappiness at work. Much of it was totally obvious to both of us, but it occurred to me that this probably isn't to everyone, which is why almost all of my colleagues (in very cushy, non-stressful jobs) nonetheless need therapy. And if...

I have fortnightly piano lessons with an extremely young teacher - yes, I left Asia only to become more Asian than I ever was back home. At a guess, I would say he's about 21 years old - very cool. Long hair, a very laid back manner of speech, and always ready with some fascinating detail about whatever piece we're...

I've just turned 29. Props to this guy for the soul read. These are just some reflections on life so far, and what I'd like to focus on in the future. A major theme of my past year has been on existential issues around work, and I think that going forward, I'll be writing more about other things... but then again,...

I was recently told about a project at a company which involved cleaning up a dataset which consisted of around 100M individual entries - the reason the cleaning is required is that, due to various absolutely fucking dumb decisions, a massive proportion of the dataset were duplicate values. Products were appearing...