Fifteen years ago, in my last semester of college, I was planning to set up my own desktop support business while supporting myself as a substitute teacher. I took and passed the California Basic Educational …

Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair, And we are the many who'll travel there. Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair, And we are the workers who'll build it there; And we will build …

I just updated my "Talks" page -- I'll be at PyCon May 19-25, to represent Zulip at a booth and then to help run the Zulip development sprint. I will likely also have a new …

I'm going to be at OSCON in Austin, Texas to represent Zulip in the Open Source Alley tomorrow (Thursday) 10am-4:30pm. Please consider coming by and getting a demo, or just talking with us about Python …

"Do your lairstone relations HAVE to come over?" she snooted. "Look, my uncles are almost done repairing their peatship, so happiest case, this is the last time for a long while." "After all day patching …

When I was eight or nine years old, I think my parents went through a chunk of "how do we support this weird kid?" planning and work. Around this time I remember coming across a …

Is it still in vogue for US tech companies to ask quantitative estimation/implausible-problem questions like "how many phone booths/piano tuners are there in Manhattan?" in hiring interviews, particularly for programming-related jobs? Fog Creek asked me …

Lindsey Kuper asked: I’m interested in hearing about [open source software] projects that have successfully adopted an "only insiders use the issue tracker" approach. For instance, a project might have a mailing list where users …

When I was in high school in Lodi, California, I worked on the school newspaper. It came out every two weeks; we gave it to the printer on Tuesday night or early Wednesday, I think, …

I sometimes sum up the lesson of a liberal arts education as: socially constructed things are real, too. And you are not immune from their effects, no matter how smart you are or whether you've …