David Golden on xdg.me

Hacking the job interview

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The best thing you can do in an interview is make the interviewer picture you already doing the job.

Once that image takes hold – you on their team, solving their problems, relieving their stress – they start to feel relief, maybe only subconsciously, at the idea of you being hired. And when it comes time to make a decision, loss aversion kicks in. It’s psychologically harder to say “no” to someone you’ve already imagined saying “yes” to.

Resources for verbal communication skills

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This list targets verbal communication in the workplace for people in the tech industry. Some links may have ideas that apply to written communications or public speaking, but that is not the focus.

I do not have personal experience with all of these, but I hope this list is still a useful jumping off point for people looking to level up their communication skills.

If you have suggestions of things to add, please tell me! My contact info is at the bottom of the page.

AI conversations

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote this in December 2024 but it sat as a draft until I rediscovered it in early 2026. I’ve backdated it as a record of where my head was at the time.

I’ve always considered myself a great refiner of other people’s ideas. Tell me your idea and I can instantly tell you what works and what doesn’t and give you lots of suggestions for refinement.

But give me a blank sheet of paper and a general topic and I’ll struggle to get traction. Even when I do, I feel the burden. It’s not fun.

Supercharging MongoDB Atlas Data Lake (MongoDB World)

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Original abstract

Data Lake Storage (DLS) is a new, managed data service that automatically optimizes your ingested data for lightning-fast analytic queries.

Join MongoDB staff engineer David Golden as he explains how we built DLS and why it improves query performance. We’ll cover how DLS ingests, partitions, and automatically rebalances your data. We’ll explain how this works in concert with our new metadata catalog to optimize query planning. And we’ll describe the asynchronous workflow underneath it all that seamlessly recovers from outages to keep your data safe.

Mentor matching platforms

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Wed, 18 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote How to mentor software engineers, but not everyone has access to mentors and mentees around them. Some companies have sprung up to try to help match people up. Here are some I’ve found:

Merit (free): tech mentorship, focused on under-networked tech workers
Mentors in Tech (free): mentorship for US community college students who are trying to break into tech
CodeMentor (paid): paid mentorship for software developers
MentorCruise (paid): paid mentorship from senior engineers and engineering managers

If you know of others I should add, please let me know.

Human-readable bytes like 'ls -lh' in Go

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I once had a feature request for “human-readable bytes like ls -lh”. Surely, there must be a library for that, I thought.

But ls -lh has special, irregular semantics I couldn’t find all implemented together in the same library!

Use no decimal or unit suffix for values under 1024 bytes: 0 or 897
Use one decimal if the integer part is a single digit: 1.0 K or 9.9 M
Use no decimal if the integer part is more than one digit: 10 K or 582 M
Aggressively round up: 999 M + 1 byte rounds up to 1 G

If you ever have a similar request, here’s some Go code you can use. Unlike ls -lh, this does add a space between the number and the suffix. It’s also generic to any base or suffixes you want. See my demo repo for more examples and test cases.

Unmarshal text with Go reflection

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As much as I like Go, I sometimes really miss dynamically-typed languages. I find Go tedious when I have to parse some arbitrary text format or lines from stdin, which would be trivial with Python, Ruby or Perl.

Parsing JSON with Go is easy – just unmarshal it right into a struct. I wanted to unmarshal a line of text the same way, so I wrote a library, strum, to do exactly that.

How to mentor software engineers

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A friend and fellow staff+ engineer posted a question to a peer group Slack:

Anyone have suggestions on how best to mentor software engineers?

At the time, I said a few things about radical candor and actionable feedback, but the question stuck with me. I mentor people, but I’ve never thought formally about what it is or how I do it. Like a lot of soft skills, we’re rarely taught how to mentor – most of us are left to figure it out on our own.

Use a career ladder for growth conversations

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A “growth conversation” is a talk with your manager about how to get promoted. It might not be explained that way, but don’t be fooled.

I’ve written this for non-managers. But if you’re a manager, use this technique and your team will love you for it!

I’ve found that a lot of these talks wind up muddy and subjective. It’s easy to come out of them without actionable steps or with generic advice.

Best career advice: ask for feedback

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The best career advice I ever heard was this:

“No one cares more about your career than you!”

If you wait for your manager or your company’s review process to give you feedback, it’s almost certainly going to come later than you’d like. There’s a good chance that you’ll have missed out on opportunities to improve and the review you eventually get will bake in the bad habits you could have fixed if only you’d known.

Articles on equity comp and value

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As I wrote How to think about equity compensation, I found the following articles helpful:

Additional articles since then:

How to think about equity compensation

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Many tech jobs pay a portion of employee compensation in the form of equity. This is a great deal for companies:

They get to defer paying you
They get to pay you without burning cash
If you quit before you vest, they don’t have to pay you
If you have a lot of unvested equity, you’re less likely to leave

How good a deal is this for employees, really?

Imagine that your employer only paid cash and said they wanted to pay part of your salary – still in cash! – in pieces over the next several years. You’d only want that deal if they were going to pay you more in the future than they would otherwise pay today to make up for the risk that you might never see the money.

Why I write

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I was out for a walk. And as I often do on walks, I used the time to think about an article I was working on. Suddenly, though, I was struck with a deeper question:

Why do I write?

I realized there are two parts to the answer to this question. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized how important both were to keeping me motivated.

Why the Apache2 License

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Sun, 23 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

For any open source work, I always pick the Apache2 License if I have the choice. It’s not as short and simple as the MIT License, but it has one killer feature:

Apache2 is the only popular open source license that makes explicit provision for licensing contributions.

Here’s the key paragraph:

Submission of Contributions.

Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions.

A better way to learn a new codebase

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Some people work on the same codebase for years, developing deep mastery. The rest of us have to start from scratch as we switch projects or jobs. Being able to learn a new codebase quickly and effectively is a programmer superpower.

Most guides I’ve seen on learning a codebase boil down to “read and ask questions”. For a small codebase, that can work. But as the codebase grows, that isn’t enough.

80/20 is half-ass when value is logistic

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Tue, 04 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

80/20 is a great heuristic for power laws and asymptotic progress, but be careful when value accrues logistically.

My friend swyx wrote an article, “80/20 is the new half-ass”, that pushed my buttons. But on a second read, I realized that nothing he said is wrong. It bothered me because it dunked on one of my favorite tools without advice for using it well.

To me, the 80/20 heuristic is a mental model about diminishing marginal returns. 80/20 thinking works best in two cases:

Using git merge --no-ff

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When working with git, I like linear history because otherwise merging concurrent feature branches makes the history graph look like spaghetti.

Two common ways to get a linear history are squashing and rebasing.

Squashing applies all the changes on the feature branch as a single linear commit on the target branch.

# Before squashing:

A---B---C main
     \
      D---E---F feature

# After squashing:

A---B---C---G(=D+E+F) main
     \
      D---E---F feature

Rebasing moves D-E-F to the tip of main. A normal merge will fast-forward, keeping the history linear.

How I broke the MongoDB Go driver ecosystem

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I unintentionally broke the MongoDB Go driver ecosystem one March weekend in 2021. Dependency management systems are hard.

In late 2018, I moved all my Go libraries from github.com/xdg to github.com/xdg-go to keep my Go work separate from other projects/languages.

This seemed painless, because GitHub automatically redirects repositories after a rename. For example, in a project that was importing github.com/xdg/stringprep, a dependency resolver would try to pull from that repository, and GitHub would transparently redirect that to github.com/xdg-go/stringprep.

Interviewing engineers, part 2

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome back! In part 1 of this article, I said:

I think tech industry hiring is pretty broken. If you feel the same and are looking for inspiration, I’ll tell you what I did differently when I had the chance.

Part 1 covered my philosophy about interviewing and I described changes I made to the hiring process:

Using promotion criteria to guide hiring criteria
Having the hiring manager do the first interview
Saving synchronous time for interaction, not coding
Using take-home exercises as part of the initial screen

I also gave examples for effective non-technical interviewing.

Interviewing engineers

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I think tech industry hiring is pretty broken. If you feel the same and are looking for inspiration, I’ll tell you what I did differently when I was a hiring manager at MongoDB.

Caveat: I don’t claim this only way to interview. It’s just something I tried that I think is better than the typical way it’s done. Take my ideas if you’d like, but do your own experiments and see what works for you.

Craft of coding reading list

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sharing a list of recommendations to help software developers learn the practice of software development as a combination of craft and career. I use this for recommendations for new junior engineers.

The items are generally language-agnostic. They cover topics including:

Professional behaviors and human interactions
Software design principles and heuristics
Testing best practices
Development practices and patterns to reduce errors
War stories about projects gone wrong

Highly recommended for entry-level developers:

Leading without managing

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

What does it mean to lead when you don’t have coercive power to get your way?

Good managers are often good leaders. But managers don’t have to be good leaders to get their way because they have authority to make decisions unilaterally.

What if you don’t have that authority?

Perhaps you’re an individual contributor. Perhaps you are a manager, but want to show leadership when you’re the junior person in the room. In both cases, you lack the authority that comes from coercive power.

Convert Google Doc to Markdown

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Occasionally, I want to convert a Google Doc to Markdown in a way that preserves links and at least some of the formatting. I’ve tried various online recommendations and been disappointed.

Here is the approach I’m using lately:

In the Google doc, select the menu item File → Download → Microsoft Word (docx).
Upload the DOCX file to @benbalter’s free Word to Markdown Converter.

Curated links on better technical interviewing

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The software industry’s usual approach to interviewing and hiring is terrible.

I’m keeping an evergreen list about problems that exist and what people are doing about it.

Also, see my own long-form article, Interviewing Engineers.

The list is roughly alphabetized by title, with a few short notes to remind me about key points. Suggestions for additions are welcome!

A Technical Hiring Process (Dave Rolsky)
- More interviewers in the room, fewer interviews overall
- Homework followed by 2nd round pairing on homework
A Walkthrough Guide to Finding an Engineering Job at Slack

Resources for system design interview prep

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

You have to do a systems design interview and you have no idea what that means?

A systems design or architecture interview is a conversation about how to build a software system given real world assumptions about scale, constraints and tradeoffs.

Typically this means drawing boxes for components like load balancers, web servers, databases, caching layers, etc. and describing how they work together to deliver the desired service.

There is no right answer! What matters is how well you can talk it through.