Personal
221 articles
- 2025 Year in Review
- Are you playing games you want to win?
- Most history is fake myth building
- 10 years in America
- What's your next mountain?
- Don't judge tech just because you're old
- It made me $500k but I think content is a bad business
- Some personal news
- I'm a different engineer than I was 3 years ago
- Hard work doesn’t scale
- Halfway there
- 2274 miles in 9 days on a cafe racer
- 2022 year in review
- Getting off twitter, an experiment
- I stopped using Google Analytics after 15 years
- You do have time to build it twice
- How I used indie hacking to sponsor my own greencard
- How I stopped chasing mice in 2021
- Reflecting on 2020
- Deep work December
- Lessons from migrating a 14 year old blog with 1500 posts to Gatsby
- Tech in 2021 according to a VC
- What if engineers were paid like athletes
- Why engineers are worth so much
- How to grow as a senior engineer or why I got a new job
- Hackers
- Looking for the perfect light work device
- What you do while waiting
- Don't just wait around
- Your dumb ideas often work best
- You don't *have* ideas, you develop them
- "I just need an idea"
- My favorite lessons from Pragmatic Programmer
- Stuck at home? Advance your career
- HOW great engineers hack The Process
- Why you should talk about engineering salaries
- Imagine you could chat with the core of your industry for 5min
- Ready to build your future?
- Announcing ServerlessReact.Dev – my new course on building apps from scratch
- How can you make an extra $1,000 🤔
- What could you do with an extra $1,000/month?
- How my bank account went from $909 to $50,000 in 2019
- A holiday CompSci reading list for you 🎅
- Thank you, friend 🦃
- What makes you a true master
- "I’m a ocean of failure... so I swim"
- How to succeed as a lead engineer – tactics and mindsets from practice
- DO more _work_ less
- San Francisco v. Europe part 2
- Thoughts on San Francisco after 2 weeks in Europe
- Come hang out in Barcelona and learn GraphQL, Serverless, Gatsby, ...
- After 9 months of freedom, today I start a new job
- Friend, go offline
- Hustle, life, and Bernoulli trials
- Coders, protect your hands; you won't like coding without em
- Build one to throw away
- The Principle of Charity in tech
- The web moves fast, how do you keep up?
- Freedom from Obligation
- What I loved about Reactathon 2019
- How Grit superchargers your career
- Do you use any special time tracking software?
- What makes you a senior software engineer anyway?
- This kid is amazing
- When you don't think you're good enough
- A bunch of cool things and neat little tips
- Focus on the process, not the goal
- How I sidehustled $180k and why it almost killed my business
- Never give up
- Why you should write [code] every day
- To experience true flow, try baking 👩🍳
- Some life advice I learned from computer science
- 31
- Why you aren’t drowning in recruiters, too
- It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work – a review
- The joy of being a beginner
- A lesson in sales from the guy who sold me $1500 of gear when all I wanted was a $100 pair of gloves
- How I sponsored my own genius visa
- Two days in New York with mum & sis ❤️
- Online workshops are MORE interactive than in-person workshops
- Lifestyle inflation after 3 years of San Francisco
- I'm tired – a poem
- Answering some common questions about React + D3 2018
- What a 3:36 marathon does to your body
- How running a side business is a lot like running a marathon
- The surprising benefit of hiring interns to write your code
- What Richard Feynman taught me about joy
- Hire these interns
- The day I drove a Porsche 356 Speedster
- I tried weed for performance enhancement and here's what I found
- What's an intermediate dev anyway?
- You have permission to suck
- Some tricks I learned recording & publishing an educational video every day for 30 days
- I tried VR on a plane and I'm a believer
- How I prepare for a talk at an 8,000 people conference
- What I learned at MicroConf Growth 2018
- Gratitude is hard – My first week with the Five Minute Journal
- Does blogging really drive sales?
- What I learned from Sherry Walling's Keeping Your Sh*t Together
- What I learned from Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century
- Reactathon 2018 was a hoot ❤️
- Coding is bad for you
- Working IN your career vs. ON your career
- Why everything must change every five years
- The story of my family is the story of survivorship bias's other side
- Don't say yes when you're happy
- After a week I must begrudgingly admit VSCode is a better editor than Emacs
- Why I won't be switching to VSCode any time soon
- How resumé-driven development shapes our industry
- What I learned from teaching StubHub about React and Redux
- What it's like to be a statistical super minority in tech
- From couch to sub 4 hour marathon in 4 short years
- Best coding headphones: Bose QuietComfort 35
- Hello, I'm Swizec, and I'm addicted to the approval of strangers on the internet.
- What I learned from So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport
- Bernoulli's trials can tell you how many job applications to send
- First day with a new 2017 MacBook Pro
- What I learned from Cal Newport's Deep Work
- Do you really need immutable data?
- The Best Goulash of your Life
- Why People Read my Weekly Emails
- This is how I connected my Canon DSLR as a webcam
- The Trouble with Vacation
- 60 seconds, 2000 miles
- If the first page of The Martian was written in different type systems
- Let's talk about filter bubbles
- These 19 Words are the Only Self-Help & Business Advice You Need
- I did an AMA, and it wasn't crickets.
- Go the fuck home
- The daring rescue of a parrot in the streets of San Francisco
- Why coding is more fun than engineering
- My weekend at Forefront in New York
- You don't need tests
- Some facts about US household income
- My blog is the best resource online for "60*60"
- Magic shiny paint
- Are You an Engineer or a Developer?
- Publish every day
- It's a trap
- I Got Schooled
- After a year, my first business diary retires
- It's Just Like Knitting
- MacOS filesystem's annoying little quirk
- Teaching beginners
- Probably the dumbest idea I ever had
- The surprising difficulty of paying the US government
- Does it even make sense to move to San Francisco?
- What I learned from Amanda Palmer's The Art of Asking
- The Evolution of a Freelancer: Lessons from the Hallway Track at DYFConf
- What I learned from Kathy Sierra's Badass
- What I learned from Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning
- The Focus app reduced my decision fatigue
- People can't spell "engineer" or "developer" even when applying for a visa
- The worst software bug I've ever had to deal with as a user
- It took me ten months to write a video course
- This is how lifestyle inflation snuck up on me
- Week 20: Making ad-hoc polymorphism less ad hoc
- Week 19: Relativity theory and time perception
- Week 18: the role of diet in periodontal disease
- Week 17: What happens when you only eat meat for a year?
- Week 16: On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
- Week 15: A tutorial on the expressiveness and universality of fold
- Week 14, heuristic evaluation of user interfaces
- Week 13, constructing logic circuits in mammalian cells
- Week 12: practical cold boot attacks that will make cryptonerds shit their pants
- Week 11, Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
- Week 10, The myriad virtues of Wavelet Trees
- Week 9: Life at low Reynold's number
- Week 8: What a girl who plays rugby can teach organizational leaders
- Week 7: Time, Clocks, and Ordering of Events in a Distributed System
- Week 6, A query on confirmation
- Week 5: Random Structures from LEGO Bricks and Analog Monte Carlo Procedures
- Week 4: Tiny insects evolve anuclear neurons
- Week 3: Of lion manes and human beards
- Week 2: Level 1 of Super Mario Bros. is easy with lexicographic orderings and
- Week 1: Turing's On computable numbers
- Inspired by the 180 websites I will understand 52 academic papers in 52 weeks
- Fun with cheap iPhone lenses
- Programmers are optimists
- Why every entrepreneur should take up boxing
- Why programmers work at night
- "Startup rollercoaster" isn't even the half of it
- Calorie counting is silly
- Mac OS X Lion and Wi-Fi
- Seems I am in love with learning
- A longboard and a school system
- KVM and the great outdoors
- The quickreading
- I learned two things today 9.9.
- I learned four things today 8.9.
- I learned two things today 5.8.
- I learned two things today 4.8.
- I learned two things today 3.9.
- I learned two things today 31.8.
- I learned two things today 30.8.
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- I learned two things today 29.8.
- I learned two things today 27.8.
- I learned two things today 25.8.
- I learned a couple of things these days 22.8. 23.8. 24.8.
- I learned two things today 21.8.
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- I learned two things today 19.8.
- I learned two things today 18.8.
- I learned two things today 16.8.
- I learned two things today 17.8.
- I learned two things today 16.8.
- I learned two things today 14.8.
- I learned two things today 12.8.
- I learned two things today 10.8.
- I learned two things today 11.8.
- I learned two things today 9.8.
- I learned two things today 8.8.
- I learned two things today 6.8.
- I learned two things today 7.8.
- I learned two things today 5.8.
- I learned two things today 2.8.
- I learned two things today 1.8.
- I learned two things today 31.7
- I learned two things today 30.7.
- I learned two things today 29.7.