Tips on xdg.me

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

Fat arrow autocorrect

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

For any programming language that uses =>, I like to add ,, as an abbreviation to type it faster and with less pinky stretch.

In vim, that’s done like this:

iab ,, =>

You can use the abbreviation/autocorrect feature in your editor to do the same.

Combining vim-closer with pumvisible

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using vim-closer for a while as a lightweight parenthesis/bracket closing plugin. I like it because it only fires when I hit enter, and it’s pretty lightweight and non-invasive.

Recently, I switched my code-completion setup to coc.nvim, but was frustrated that Go’s gopls preselect puts vim’s completion pop-up menu into the “selected” state, which takes over the behavior of the enter key to accept the selection (c.f. menu completion state 2). Here’s an example:

How I migrated my blog from Wordpress to Hugo

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When I decided to migrate my old Wordpress blog to a new, Hugo-based website, I thought I’d write down my notes along the way and make a detailed migration guide. Unfortunately, best laid plans go awry and by the time I was done, I only had a few notes and didn’t remember all the context.

Nevertheless, I’m sharing what notes I do have, so that even if it’s not a “detailed” guide, I can at least give some pointers to someone else attempting the same thing.

Setting up a Perl development environment with plenv

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 09:56:20 +0000

This is a slightly modified copy of something I posted internally at work about setting up a development environment using plenv, which keeps your working Perl isolated from your system Perl. Many expert Perl developers already have some variation of this, but I’m posting it as a public service for people who’ve wanted this but never got around to it.

(I used to use perlbrew, but switched to plenv and haven’t looked back).

Putting social media on cruise-control

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 22:52:15 +0000

I’m not very good with social media. I get overwhelmed with all the posts.

Yes, I occasionally share my blog posting. I occasionally – very occasionally – share interesting articles. I occasionally ask a question or make a snarky comment. But, really, my posting is totally haphazard. It doesn’t build any presence and it doesn’t fit my workflow. I need a better system.

So here’s my plan:

Anything I want to share, I’m going to put on Tumblr
Anything on Tumblr will get picked up by IFTTT and sent to Buffer
Buffer will space out posts to Twitter, App.net, Facebook and LinkedIn

Why Tumblr?

I don’t expect anyone to read my Tumblr, but posting is so easy that I’ll use it as single-collection point for things I want to share. For example:

Giving thanks as thanks

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:06:26 +0000

Ricardo wrote an article “promoting little gifts”, which @perlbuzz tweeted as “giving little gifts as thanks”.

I like that idea, and it inspired me to remind people to please also consider just giving “thanks”, too.

Sure, I’d love a song or a small ebook (and maybe I should set up a wishlist), but I also love getting an email saying thanks, particularly when it is from someone I don’t already know telling me that they like a module I released to CPAN or telling me how they are using my code to solve some problem they have. Email is cheap, but still has huge impact.

Fixing screen brightness on Thinkpad X201 and Ubuntu 10.10

xdg@xdg.me (David Golden) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 16:05:31 +0000

I just tried installing Ubuntu 10.10 on my Thinkpad X201. For the most part, everything worked right away and on an SSD drive, it felt blazingly fast.

However, the screen brightness controls did not work. Some online research suggested adding acpi_osi=Linux to the kernel boot parameters and I also found a tip in the thinkpad-acpi driver documentation for how to force-enable it (over the native Linux ACPI driver).

First, edit your /etc/default/grub file to add acpi_osi=Linux and acpi_backlight=vendor arguments to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. It should look something like this: