Top all-time · #415
Swizec Teller
Personal blog · swizec.com/blog · on HN as Swizecprogrammingcareerstartups
Swizec Teller's personal blog at swizec.com covers programming, career and startups. Since 2010, 135 different Hacker News readers have linked it 476 times, most often “Why Programmers work at night (2011)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (22) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link his posts on state machines and XState, why programmers work at night, and his visa and career stories. Also cited for desire paths and a summary of McCarthy's LISP paper.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- "Great summary" of McCarthy's LISP paper; XState example "to great effect"; visa saga "amazing"; "Read this".
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 22 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I write emails with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer. Raw and honest from the heart, fueled by lessons learned over 20 years of building production code.
Most-linked posts?
- Why Programmers work at night (2011)12 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2011-12-15
- You Shouldn't Use AI to Write Your Tests4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-05-26
- Software Engineering at Google4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-07-17
- The birth of Lisp - a summary of McCarthy's original paper3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-08-22
- /blog/how-i-used-indie-hacking-to-sponsor-my-own-greencard/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-05-11
- Why taming architectural complexity is paramount2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-12-25
- Animating SVG Nodes in React, Preact, Inferno, Vue, Angular 2, and CycleJS2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-12-24
- I was wrong about AngularJS2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-09-25
- Time, Clocks, and Ordering of Events2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-12-03
- Code quality is irrelevant and other lessons learned in San Francisco2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-04-15
What Hacker News says?
We can measure and quantify this cognitive load! I’ve been researching this for a book and have found some really cool research from ~10 years ago. It seems people stopped thinking about this around when microservices became popular (but they have the same problems just with http/grpc calls instead). There are two main ways to measure this: 1. Cyclomatic/mccabe complexity tells you how hard an individual module or e…
Comment linking /blog/why-taming-architectural-complexity-is-paramount/
on “Cognitive load is what matters”Submitted Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets as a story · 536 points
HN discussion> So, is pile-of-if-statements the best we can do for business software? You’ll enjoy the Big Ball of Mud paper[1]. Real world systems are prone to decay. You first of all start with a big ball of mud because you’re building a system before you know what you want. Then as parts of the system grow up, you improve the design. Then things change again and the beautiful abstraction breaks down. Production software is al…
Comment linking /blog/big-ball-of-mud-the-worlds-most-popular-software-architecture/
on “Cognitive load is what matters”Submitted Apple's ping is a big pile of steaming dung as a story · 158 points
HN discussion> To me that reeks of badly structured code, with bad abstraction layers, perhaps stuffing too much stuff into a single module or, if the language is still backward and doesn't have modules, a file Yes and that’s normal. Big ball of mud is the worlds most popular software architecture. Original: http://www.laputan.org/mud/ My modern take based on the original: https://swizec.com/blog/big-ball-of-mud-the-worlds-most-…
Comment linking /blog/big-ball-of-mud-the-worlds-most-popular-software-architecture/
on “Plain Vanilla Web”Submitted I used indie hacking to sponsor my own green card as a story · 138 points
HN discussion> Doesn't this just change into /../ Yes and no! TypeScript helps a lot – you get quick traceability of where things are used and squiggly lines, if you break a contract. Yes a statically typed MVC framework would get you this, but in my experience the apps that get into this mess also don't use types "because types add too much complexity" (likely true for that company stage). Componentization brings the other piec…
Comment linking /blog/a-pattern-for-composable-ui-in-flask/
on “Plain Vanilla Web”Submitted My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet as a story · 134 points
HN discussionSimilar. I put out free technical blogs and charge for technical books. For a demographic that's allergic to paying, engineers are really profitable. An extra $30k/year is pretty nice for a sidehustle I think. Mostly on track to do double that this year. And of course, if a company asks for consulting, I charge. But I'm not focusing on consulting these days. However a company is paying me to develop tech material fo…
Comment linking /blog/learned-6x-income-4-years/swizec/7340
on “Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave”Submitted Interview like an asset, not a beggar as a story · 116 points
HN discussionAm on O-1 visa, would consider myself closer to super talented than internationally recognised. It’s very achievable if you put the right kind of work in. Some blogs for the curious: https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-got-a-visa-normally-reserved-f... https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-sponsored-my-own-genius-visa/
Comment linking /blog/how-i-sponsored-my-own-genius-visa/
on “Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay”Submitted Inspired by the 180 websites I will understand 52 academic papers in 52 weeks as a story · 115 points
HN discussionAnd global warming was much milder when we had more pirates in the world [1]. Correlation is not causation. In the same period, YouTube's management style and public-facing attitude have changed dramatically, Google's general attempt at being the "good guys" has pretty much vanished, and beancounting has taken over as the guiding principle in many respects. I have zero reason to believe that had Adblocking not been…
Comment linking /blog/pirates-downfall-causes-global-warming
on “Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web”Submitted Computer science is not software engineering as a story · 108 points
HN discussionI don’t know dude, this one time I wrote a LOLCODE compiler into a Babel macro. https://swizec.com/blog/lolcodetojavascript-compiler-babel-m... It was pretty fun. Also this other time I wrote a nodejs script to keep my computer at a specific temperature because our office fridge kept freezing my carrots. https://swizec.com/blog/i-built-a-node-app-to-thaw-my-favori...
Comment linking /blog/i-built-a-node-app-to-thaw-my-favorite-snack/
on ““Normal” engineers are the key to great teams”Submitted Strange line of Python as a story · 103 points
HN discussionYes, this, exactly. Swizec recently wrote about "desire paths": https://swizec.com/blog/architecture-is-like-a-path-in-the-w...
Comment linking /blog/architecture-is-like-a-path-in-the-woods/
on “I keep a WTF notebook (2021)”Submitted I think content is a bad business as a story · 96 points
HN discussionI’ve seen Picallilli’s stuff around and it looks extremely solid. But you can’t beat the market. You either have what they want to buy, or you don’t. > Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that The market is speaking. Long-term you’ll find out who’s…
Comment linking /blog/the-programming-tutorial-seo-industry-is-dead/
on “It’s been a very hard year”Submitted Software Engineering at Google as a story · 93 points
HN discussionThe question isn't does it work, it's how long does it work for. For example, diets work. But most have a fall-off-the-wagon rate in the couple of months range. It's definitely easy to quit a social media platform cold turkey. The hard part is quitting social media. I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month. S…
Comment linking /blog/the-end-of-my-internet-diet-experiment/swizec/2507
on “Why I deleted my Facebook account”Submitted Why software only moves forward as a story · 92 points
HN discussionThis is a shameless plug, but I like the approach in my book React+d3js -> http://swizec.com/reactd3js Code samples in the book still use D3 v3, but my most recent experiments have been in v4. There's a lot of content in there on animation and transitions, which seems like the hard part. Currently figuring out how to do mass 10k+ element animations. Adding it to the book when I figure it out.
Comment linking /reactd3js
on “D3 v4.0.0 released”Submitted Workflowy is to TODO as git is to svn as a story · 86 points
HN discussionThis is also untrue. You can live in perfect health on fat and protein alone. Humans can’t make the essential amino acids necessary for making some proteins so we need to eat protein, and there are a number of vitamins that are fat/oil but not water soluble so we need at least some fat but a no carbohydrate diet with sufficient fat is fine as long as you get enough fat. If you only eat lean meat that will be bad for…
Comment linking /blog/week-17-what-happens-when-you-only-eat-meat-for-a-year/swizec/6534
on “Anxiety and burnout: why kids are consumed with worry”Submitted Postme.me - idea to sales in 3 days as a story · 84 points
HN discussionMy favorite lens on this comes from Hamming: > It is well known the drunken sailor whos taggers to the left or right n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a…
Comment linking /blog/your-career-needs-a-vision/
on “If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)”Submitted A turing machine in 133 bytes of javascript as a story · 82 points
HN discussionAll I really want from computerized eyewear is telemetry for sports. Current time/pace/distance/route/whatever when I'm running. Current speed, next corner severity/distance when I'm longboarding. ( http://swizec.com/blog/ifihadglass-the-app-i-want-to-build/s... ) That alone would be worth the money to me. Such things already exist for skiing goggles, but those aren't extensible and only really fit one sport. So tha…
Comment linking /blog/ifihadglass-the-app-i-want-to-build/swizec/6035
on “What I’ve learned from 35 years of wearing computerized eyewear”Submitted Why I only work with startups as a story · 69 points
HN discussion
