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Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
The hover effects on Amazon’s big ‘ole “Shop by Department” mega dropdown are super fast. Look'it how quick each submenu fills in as your mouse moves down the list:It’s instant. I got nerd sniped by...
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The Absolute Minimum Every Khan Academy Developer Absolutely, Positively Must...
Heard a bit of an interview with Dick Costolo while driving home. He was telling the story of why he started his “Managing at Twitter” course that he personally teaches to all new managers. It went...
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You must stop coding, you must keep coding
Our dev team’s grown to twenty-three and when the summer intern zenith hits we’ll be — this is weird to type — forty for a few frightening days.My biggest personal challenge now, by far: How do you...
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Public speaking is a chance to make myself uncomfortable
Giving public talks is one of those few activities (see: flying) that causes an enormous surge of nervous adrenaline to course through my body.*But at the same time I love sharing Khan Academy’s work....
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Getting your team to adopt new technology
Recently two Khan Academy devs dropped into our team chat and said they were gonna use React to write a new feature. They even hinted that we may want to adopt it product-wide.“The library is only a...
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The App Engine Way
The phrase “the App Engine way” is muttered around our office and wielded in our code reviews. As in, “Yeah, I know it’s counterintuitive, but that’s the App Engine way.”It boils down to two principles...
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How we ran the second Khan Academy Healthy Hackathon
I heard from a number of people who got value out of last year’s “How We Hackathon” post (that number, for those curious, is ‘3’). Here goes round two.Just like before, our hackathons’ defining...
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Team culture for free
The other day I was talking to David, learning whatever I could about how he works his VPEngineering magic over at Stack Exchange. Technical interviews came up. He was interested in new types of...
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"Our team needs more people"
You know those puzzles with the matchsticks? Where you have some shape made out of ‘em and then you remove one and somehow, magically, you’re supposed to reform the original shape with one less...
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"Shipping beats perfection" explained
When we sat down to write Khan Academy’s company values in 2010, “shipping beats perfection” flew out of Sal’s mouth before our butts hit the chairs.It’s almost 3 years later. I have one-on-ones with...
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The most common feedback we give dev interns
I’ve been lucky to see ~70 interns pass through the dev teams at Khan Academy and Fog Creek. If you know me you know how much I enjoy internships. Infinitely better than an interview, enough time to...
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Email transparency at Khan Academy
Whenever we mention that almost all Khan Academy email is visible to everybody on the team, people always wanna know more.The idea is unapologetically copied from Stripe. Whether they originally came...
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Three minute quiz: App Engine datastore performance
As somebody now spending all his time in NoSQL land, my brain perked up when working through The Three Minute SQL Performance Quiz. It was a blast from the past for me, a chance to remember all the...
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Going over the top
When Andy recently decided to join Khan Academy, he emailed us a secretive app and said to run it on an iPad. When we did we found a fun little toy — if the device was angled in just the right way and...
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KA Lite
Choosing what to work on is one of the hardest things we do at Khan Academy. Saying no’s hard for everyone, but it sure does feel tough when the person you’re saying no to is some earnest child trying...
View ArticleA book hiding in a gist
A while back — after leaving Heroku — Adam Wiggins left this little note on twitter:My Heroku values: https://t.co/IqFDFF4gUj— Adam Wiggins (@hirodusk) May 31, 2013I normally don’t just “reblog”...
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Margaret Hamilton and the First Men on the Moon
First Men on the Moon is one of my favorite little educational resources. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to being part of the Apollo 11 moon landing. They took the actual video filmed outside the...
View ArticleKhan Academy’s Engineering Principles
You know those super-frustrating movie scenes where the entire plotline is driven by some sort of completely avoidable communication failure? Where if the two characters WOULD JUST FRIGGIN’ TALK TO...
View ArticleThankful and lucky to have helped build Khan Academy
In early 2010 I saw Sal Khan doing something inspiring. He had been diligently posting educational video after educational video on YouTube for years (“secret to overnight success…”) and was starting...
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Announcing Spring Discovery
I’m proud to announce our team, funding, and ambitious mission at Spring Discovery. We’re fighting back against the diseases of old age by accelerating the discovery of anti-aging therapies.Why do...
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