Top all-time · #180
Zach Holman
Personal blog · zachholman.com · on HN as holmanprogrammingculture
Zach Holman's personal blog at zachholman.com covers programming and culture. Since 2010, 238 different Hacker News readers have linked it 364 times, most often “Fuck Your 90 Day Exercise Window (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 15 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Zach Holman's posts on UTC and time handling, remote-first work, GitHub's culture and talk slides, and name his blog among favourite personal sites.
- Recommended for · 15 comments
- Called a favourite, a very good read and a great post on UTC, remote-first work and talk design; one commenter enjoyed his thoughts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Most-linked posts?
- Fuck Your 90 Day Exercise Window (2016)12 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2016-07-14
- UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-05-29
- Firing People9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2016-03-16
- Double Shipping7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-08-08
- How to Deploy Software6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-03-01
- Write Angry6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-11-11
- How Github uses Github to build Github5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-03-24
- Utter Disregard for Git Commit History5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-03-08
- Slide Design for Developers4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-10-24
- Scaling GitHub's Employees4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-09-29
What Hacker News says?
This first request is the anti-thesis of GitHub's simple approach: >Issues are often filed missing crucial information like reproduction steps or version tested. We’d like issues to gain custom fields, along with a mechanism (such as a mandatory issue template, perhaps powered by a newissue.md in root as a likely-simple solution) for ensuring they are filled out in every issue. Every checkbox, text-field and dropdow…
Comment linking /talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-github/
on “Dear GitHub”Submitted Fired as a story · 1039 points
HN discussionIn that story he was trying to go to the second floor from the third to collect his bag before leaving. https://zachholman.com/talk/firing-people
Comment linking /talk/firing-people
on “If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley”Submitted The Depression Thing as a story · 841 points
HN discussionhttps://zachholman.com/talk/firing-people
Comment linking /talk/firing-people
on “If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley”Submitted UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right? as a story · 757 points
HN discussionThis is the same Zac Holman who was fired from GitHub [0] when he was having tough times. It's great how open he is about it. I'm waiting until we see going to the doctor to talk about pain in your brain the same as going to talk about pain in say your colon. That is, perhaps not something you'd talk about to everyone but at least you'll be able to see someone for free in Europe or with minimal insurance costs in th…
Comment linking /talk/firing-people
on “The Depression Thing”Submitted Only 90s Web Developers Remember This as a story · 710 points
HN discussionTime to pull up my RSS reader! https://drewdevault.com/ http://jvns.ca/ https://www.benkuhn.net/ https://danluu.com/ https://scattered-thoughts.net/ http://antirez.com/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/ https://neilkakkar.com/ https://zachholman.com/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/ https://endler.dev/ https://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/ https://www.the-paper-trail.org/ https://tonsky.me/ https://dave.cheney.net/ https://b…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Only 90s web developers remember this (2014) as a story · 628 points
HN discussionSurprised to see nobody has yet mentioned Zach Holman's blog: https://zachholman.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted How to Deploy Software as a story · 552 points
HN discussionSemi-related, one of my favorite posts on UTC. Seems simple to use until it’s not. https://zachholman.com/talk/utc-is-enough-for-everyone-right
Comment linking /talk/utc-is-enough-for-everyone-right
on “Microsoft Exchange stops passing mail due to bug on 1/1/22”Submitted Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014) as a story · 546 points
HN discussionThat's probably a custom client for Campfire (right underneath the screenshot[1] they say it's Campfire). [1]: http://zachholman.com/posts/github-communication/ (first screenshot)
Comment linking /posts/github-communication/
on “Update on Julie Horvath's Departure”Submitted Move Fast and Break Nothing as a story · 459 points
HN discussionAt the same time: http://zachholman.com/posts/github-communication/ > We still use (and love) Campfire.
Comment linking /posts/github-communication/
on “Update on Julie Horvath's Departure”Submitted JavaScript for People Who Hate JavaScript as a story · 429 points
HN discussionHere's my personal website: https://matall.in I'm a fan of personal sites, too. Some of the ones that I like most, in no particular order: https://macwright.org https://zachholman.com https://warpspire.com https://paulstamatiou.com http://francisco.dance https://craigmod.com
Comment linking /
on “Building a Kickass Portfolio”Submitted Don't Give Your Users Shit Work as a story · 410 points
HN discussionHere are some of the blogs I follow: https://tjcx.me/ https://blog.vjeux.com/ https://zachholman.com/ https://rsms.me/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?”Submitted How Github uses Github to build Github as a story · 389 points
HN discussionTime is hard: https://zachholman.com/talk/utc-is-enough-for-everyone-right This is all because of the fact that we're trying to represent the time taken by the earth (an arbitrary planet that has no impact on the universe whatsoever) to revolve around the sun (an arbitrary star) in terms of the amount of time the earth takes to rotate around itself. These two obviously unrelated things are somehow merged into to cre…
Comment linking /talk/utc-is-enough-for-everyone-right
on “Infinite loop in macOS Night Shift in the summer near the Arctic Circle”Submitted OAuth Will Murder Your Children as a story · 380 points
HN discussionGit actually supports this, believe it or not, although it's a bit wonky (of course): https://github.com/ewanmellor/git-diff-image/blob/master/REA... https://zachholman.com/posts/command-line-image-diffs/
Comment linking /posts/command-line-image-diffs/
on “The future of large files in Git is Git”Submitted Scaling GitHub as a story · 348 points
HN discussion[Zach Holman]( https://zachholman.com/ ) is a big one for me.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”Submitted Firing People as a story · 322 points
HN discussionAre you sure that's the same person? The site seems to belong to "Zach Holman" [1] But the blog post attributes to "Aja Romano" [2] [1] https://zachholman.com/about [2] https://www.dailydot.com/author/aja-romano/
Comment linking /about
on “Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)”Submitted Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You as a story · 306 points
HN discussion
