I've been in your shoes. Solo developer, 10-person startup, 1000+ person maze—I've worked across company sizes from individual contributor to manager-of-managers. Started programming at seven, spent over a decade in the trenches.

The technical problems are rarely the real problems. The real challenges are sociotechnical: building software with humans, creating teams that work together instead of against each other, aligning what we build with what actually matters.

You're tasked with reviewing the code challenge of another candidate. You download the project.zip file, extract it, and it doesn't run. You can't tell what part of the code is auto-generating scaffolding, or what part is the complex part. You can't really get an idea of if the code would work, or was even written by the candidate. You don't even know if they did the entire project in one big commit or not. As long as there's nothing horribly wrong, you'll pass them.

Most companies have some kind of code challenge in their interview process. While you may like or dislike this practice for different reasons, one thing that can easily remove a bunch of headaches here is to stop asking for zip-files of that project.

If you search "We only hire the best," you'll discover that literally everyone only hires the best. How can 100% of businesses hire from the top 5% of the talent pool? What happens to the other 95% of developers?

The answer is simple: it's nonsense. Nobody hires exclusively the best, nor should they. We don't even have industry-wide objective metrics to measure developers consistently.

This post explores how to build strong teams focused on total throughput instead of hiring based on abstract criteria where you can only hope for the best.

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. – Douglas Hofstadter

Developers and managers both want scope and delivery time to align, but despite working toward a common goal, they rarely do. The gap is often so large that deadlines are missed, products become irrelevant, and teams face burnout.

Three major schools of thought explain why Hofstadter's Law persists in software development.

You'll learn how to use the Rumprun toolchain to build a unikernel that hosts your static website served by Nginx. This tutorial focuses on giving application and web developers practical steps to get running with Rump Kernel-based unikernels.

This assumes you're on a GNU/Linux or BSD system and familiar with command line basics.

Your monitor is awful. Not because you bought the wrong one, and not because it lacks enough pixels. Computer displays have evolved dramatically since the days of punch cards and blinking lights on supercomputers, eventually progressing through oscilloscopes to today's flat, lightweight panels with high resolution and millions of colors.

Yet despite these advances, we've hit a wall.

There's something we lost when HTTP became the only game in town. Before the web browser dominated everything, the internet was a diverse ecosystem of protocols, each designed for specific purposes. We had telnet for raw connections, Gopher for clean content delivery, and text-based worlds that fostered creativity in ways the modern web struggles to match.

Understanding these "old ways" isn't just nostalgia. It reveals how much richer the internet could be, and why our current web-centric approach may be holding us back.

Problem 001​

On the popular programming challenge website Project Euler, the first problem seems quite trivial. However, with deeper examination we can discover layers of complexity as we try to generalize the problem.

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.