It’s now more common for layoffs to happen through account lockouts. Every employee needs to download their most important files from work, and update them periodically.

Anyone considering a career change might tire of people telling them, “Do what you love, and the rest will follow.” How can you be so sure? What counts as “love”? This is work we’re talking about! For anyone looking less for a passion project and more for what they’d be really good at, author Amy Krouse Rosenthal tweeted this advice in 2013. It’s deceptively Zen: If you watch your mind at work, you’ll start to notice patterns of thought, which will show you where your strengths are. It’ll also be good practice for when you do finally land that new gig, since good work does — always and necessarily — require focus and attention.

How do you ask to be demoted? This is not something I hear people talk about. I've done it twice in my career. If you're in this position, I hope my experience can help in some way.

Are you giving your first technical interview? Good luck! Here's some thoughts from someone who's done it a lot over the years.

Lately I've gotten a lot of questions about getting started in Open Source, mostly from students interested in the Google Summer of Code. Here I try to give some advice on getting started.

I talk about the need to refactor and when you should start fresh. It's something many engineers, especially the more junior, tend to struggle with.

Someone was recently surprised that I spend less than 30 minutes on these blog posts. I talk a little bit about how I learned to speed up my writing.

How do you know that you're working on the right problem? I discuss some of the pitfalls and approaches I've seen to dealing with this sticky topic.

It's my last week at my current company, so I'm getting asked frequently for parting thoughts. Here is some general advice that has served me well.

Suppose you already know it's a good idea to refactor your code and you need your manager to approve it. This article talks about how to get them to agree.

About twice a year someone asks me if I think they should get a PhD. This isn't a simple question to answer.

In this post I'm responding to a question someone asked about how to deal with the fact that they're constantly distracted by life outside of the office.

In this post I review what I'm looking for in a resume. I try to give practical advice based on both my experience and the feedback I've seen others give.