In the time since I started writing this blog, a couple of posts have gone viral, many have gotten a reasonable amount of traffic, and others have disappeared without a trace. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that the most popular of my posts have also been the most actionable – how to write an effective resume, how to ace a technical interview, and so on. Conversely, many (though certainly not all) of the posts I’m proudest of have been seen by the fewest people – these have mostly been thought pieces, more abstract, and more personal.
And so, I present you with a short list of some of my personal favorites – posts even I go back to and read from time to time. I recommend them to you as one friend to another – these are the posts I think you’ll find the most interesting, the ones which (I flatter myself) might even change the way you look at the world. Or, perhaps, that will convince you that I’m a very tedious writer indeed. In any case, in rough order of personal preference:
- Silver Bullets – in which I disagree with one of the biggest names in software project management, thirty years after the fact.
- Lost Skills – concerns about what happens when a generation no longer needs basic skills.
- Customer Service – what happens when you treat strangers like people.
- Hackers and Software Engineers – a fun piece that turned surprisingly controversial when it got some traction on Reddit.
- Shutting down a dream – my most popular post, about startup dreams that came crashing down.
- The “Mastery” cycle – meditations on what it means to achieve mastery, and how to get there.
Dan Dreams of Coding 