David Golden on xdg.me

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

This list targets verbal communication in the workplace for people in the tech industry.

I wrote this in December 2024 but it sat as a draft until I rediscovered it in early 2026.

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

I wrote How to mentor software engineers, but not everyone has access to mentors and mentees around them.

I once had a feature request for “human-readable bytes like ls -lh”.

As much as I like Go, I sometimes really miss dynamically-typed languages.

A friend and fellow staff+ engineer posted a question to a peer group Slack: Anyone have suggestions on how best to mentor software engineers?

A “growth conversation” is a talk with your manager about how to get promoted.

The best career advice I ever heard was this: “No one cares more about your career than you!”

As I wrote How to think about equity compensation, I found the following articles helpful: A No B.S.

Many tech jobs pay a portion of employee compensation in the form of equity.

I was out for a walk.

For any open source work, I always pick the Apache2 License if I have the choice.

Some people work on the same codebase for years, developing deep mastery.

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

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

I unintentionally broke the MongoDB Go driver ecosystem one March weekend in 2021.

Welcome back!

I think tech industry hiring is pretty broken.

I’m sharing a list of recommendations to help software developers learn the practice of software development as a combination of craft and career.

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

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

Occasionally, I want to convert a Google Doc to Markdown in a way that preserves links and at least some of the formatting.

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