Top all-time · #2723
Jessica Kerr
Personal blog · jessitron.comprogrammingcareerculture
Jessica Kerr writes Jessitron, a personal blog at jessitron.com about programming, career and culture. Since 2020, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 85 times, most often “Those pesky pull request reviews”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Jessica Kerr (aka jessitron) is a developer and symmathecist. Here are my accomplishments.
Most-linked posts?
- Those pesky pull request reviews6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2021-03-27
- Velocity defeats itself. Get acceleration instead4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-12-22
- Better Coordination, or Better Software?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-08-02
- Resilience and Waste in Software Teams3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-17
- Who Are We Now?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-08-30
- A high-resilience org chart2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-05-26
- Command vs. Control2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-02
- Five Measurements You Should Make and Then Ignore (Plus One to Watch Intently)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-24
- When costs are nonlinear, keep it small2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-19
- How hard can it be to buy software?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-09
What Hacker News says?
Fred Brooks had it right oh so many years ago. Communication is an exponential cost, so the more skills that you can give to a single person, the more they can do. But it's even better than that, as every time communication occurs you are playing a game of telephone with translation errors. The essential complexity might be very easy, but when you need to translate that problem from users to project managers to arch…
Comment linking /2021/05/26/a-high-resilience-org-chart/
on “Developers can't fix bad management (2020)”Submitted Hitting OKRs vs. Doing Your Job as a story · 369 points
HN discussionThis reminded me a lot of Jessitron's latest blog post.[0] [0]: https://jessitron.com/2021/05/26/a-high-resilience-org-chart...
Comment linking /2021/05/26/a-high-resilience-org-chart/
on “Clever vs. Insightful Code”Submitted When costs are nonlinear, keep it small as a story · 179 points
HN discussionSome links I've saved. That said, there's no accounting for taste: https://tylr.fun/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30440123 https://world.hey.com/dhh/google-suffers-from-a-digital-petr... https://vpostrel.com/ https://h3rald.com/ https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/posts/2022/boring/ http://diveintohtml5.info/storage.html https://moxie.org/stories.html https://trevorklee.com/my-terrible-plan-for-reducing-opioid-...…
Comment linking /2021/11/28/software-development-pushes-us-to-get-better-as-people/
on “Ask HN: What are the best-designed personal blogs you’ve come across?”Submitted The Enterprise Eats Software as a story · 105 points
HN discussionSubmitted Software development pushes us to get better as people as a story · 92 points
HN discussionSubmitted Better Coordination, or Better Software? as a story · 71 points
HN discussionSubmitted Communication Structures in a Growing Organization as a story · 47 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Viable Systems Model, and where my team fits as a story · 41 points
HN discussionSubmitted OKRs for Evil and Good as a story · 39 points
HN discussionSubmitted 10x Engineers: The Purple Developer as a story · 34 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cascading OKRs: We can do Better as a story · 32 points
HN discussionSubmitted Keep Your Experiments Separate as a story · 30 points
HN discussionSubmitted Who Are We Now? as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSubmitted Augmented Coding: Better with Principles as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Those pesky pull request reviews as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSubmitted How hard can it be to buy software? as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Better Coordination, or Better Software? as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Those pesky pull request reviews as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Back when software was a craft as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Who Are We Now? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why is every startup's website so darn useless? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stupid bash tricks: a self-updating script as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Better Coordination, or Better Software? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stupidity can be a plus in corporations – but not in software development as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Who are we Now? – Jessitron as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted What is special about MCP? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted What is special about MCP? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted When Efficiency Isn't Wasteful as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
