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21 articles in Career.
About this section
Career writing for developers is mostly written by people selling a course. This is written by people who hire, and who have been on the other side of it recently enough to remember. It covers what a hiring process is really weighing, why the strongest candidate on paper often is not the one who gets the offer, what moving from contracting into running a team actually costs you, and how to read a job description for the things it is not saying. Some of it is about our own hiring, including the parts we got wrong and changed. It is a smaller section than the technical ones and deliberately so: we would rather publish twenty posts we can stand behind than two hundred on how to answer interview questions.
All 21 articles
P.01Forward-deployed engineer job postings grew over 1,000% year-over-year heading into 2026, with comp bands clustering at $300K-$550K. Here's what the role actually is, why it exists, and what it means if you're hiring or being hired.
P.02Microsoft laid off 4,800 employees on July 6, 2026, hitting Xbox and commercial sales hardest, even as it keeps pouring money into AI infrastructure. Here's what the pattern means if you build software for a living.
P.03MLOps sits between the model-building work of a data scientist and the general infrastructure work of a DevOps engineer. Here's what the role actually owns, what to screen for, and where the candidates come from.
P.04Agent sandbox escapes, prompt injection, and tool-permission design are a distinct skill set from traditional application security. Here's what to screen for, where to find candidates, and how the role differs from a generalist cybersecurity hire.
P.05Rails isn't the default startup choice it was a decade ago, but it didn't disappear either. Here's an honest read on where Rails still wins, where it loses to Next.js and Django, and who should actually spend time learning it in 2026.
P.06North Korea-linked campaigns are hiding malware inside take-home coding tests, using steganography in SVG images to slip past review. Here's how the Contagious Interview campaign actually works and how to vet a coding challenge before you run it.
P.07Platform engineering has its own hiring cluster now, distinct from DevOps, SRE, and cloud architecture. Here's how to define the role correctly, screen candidates for product thinking over ticket-taking, and avoid paying platform-engineer money for ops-with-a-new-title.
P.08AI coding agents have made broad, shallow knowledge cheap to fake and easy to automate. What's getting scarcer, and more valuable, is the deep expertise to know when the agent's output is wrong. Here's how to think about specializing versus generalizing in 2026.
P.09New June 2026 data shows software engineer job listings up 30% with 67,000+ open roles — even as AI headlines focus on layoffs. Here's what the numbers actually show about who's hiring, which skills matter, and where the market is contracting.
P.10Most developers leave money on the table not because they lack leverage, but because they negotiate too early, disclose their current salary, or accept the first number. Here is what actually works.
P.11The remote market is more competitive and more winnable than it looks. The developers who get hired are not always the strongest coders. They are the easiest to evaluate. Here is how to become one of them.
P.12AI projects flood every portfolio. Here's what actually distinguishes a developer's work from the crowd — and why the way you document your decisions matters more than the tech stack you picked.
P.13Burnout among developers isn't new. But the specific pressures of 2026 — AI-driven productivity expectations, skills anxiety, and the blurring of output and identity — create a different texture of exhaustion.
P.14The honest read on web developer demand after AI's impact, which roles are hot, which are cooling, and what the working week actually looks like across employment types.
P.15EditorPickThe real story of going from solo freelancer to running a tech agency. Revenue, hiring mistakes, client nightmares, and the systems that finally made it work.
P.16EditorPickGoogle Summer of Code 2026 accepted 185 organizations. Here is everything you need to know — eligibility, timeline, stipends up to $6,600, how to write a winning proposal, and the mistakes that get you rejected.
P.17The traditional developer career ladder is fragmenting. IC tracks, management, staff-plus roles, and hybrid paths offer different ways to grow. Here's how to navigate them.
P.18The developer employment landscape offers more options than ever. Here's an honest comparison of freelancing, agency work, and full-time employment to help you decide.
P.19Tech interviews are evolving. Take-home projects, AI-assisted coding, and system design are reshaping how companies evaluate developers. Here's what to expect.
P.20EditorPickA structured 100-day data science bootcamp roadmap covering Python, statistics, machine learning, deep learning, and real-world projects.
P.21A step-by-step guide to writing and publishing research papers in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning — from ideation to submission.