Willingness to look stupid
Dan Luu21 Oct 2021
People frequently think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid...
Dan Luu
danluu.comadded August 2026
3%What to learn
Dan Luu18 Oct 2021
It's common to see people advocate for learning skills that they have or using processes that they use.
Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity
Dan Luu15 Oct 2021
A common topic of discussion among my close friends is where the bottlenecks are in our productivity and how we can execute more quickly.
The value of in-house expertise
Dan Luu29 Sept 2021
An alternate title for this post might be, "Twitter has a kernel team!?". At this point, I've heard that surprised exclamation enough that I've lost count of the number times that's been said to me...
Measurement, benchmarking, and data analysis are underrated
Dan Luu27 Aug 2021
A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead?
Against essential and accidental complexity
Dan Luu29 Dec 2020
In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity.
How do cars do in out-of-sample crash testing?
Dan Luu30 Jun 2020
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks.
Finding the Story
Dan Luu2 Jun 2020
This is an archive of an old pseudonymously written post from the 90s from someone whose former pseudonym seems to have disappeared from the internet.
A simple way to get more value from tracing
Dan Luu31 May 2020
A lot of people seem to think that distributed tracing isn't useful, or at least not without extreme effort that isn't worth it for companies smaller than FB.
A simple way to get more value from metrics
Dan Luu30 May 2020
We spent one day building a system that immediately found a mid 7 figure optimization (which ended up shipping).
How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
Dan Luu11 Mar 2020
I've been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it's pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire...
The growth of command line options, 1979-Present
Dan Luu3 Mar 2020
My hobby: opening up McIlroy’s UNIX philosophy on one monitor while reading manpages on the other.
Suspicious discontinuities
Dan Luu18 Feb 2020
If you read any personal finance forums late last year, there's a decent chance you ran across a question from someone who was desperately trying to lose money before the end of the year.
95%-ile isn't that good
Dan Luu7 Feb 2020
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist.
Algorithms interviews: theory vs. practice
Dan Luu5 Jan 2020
When I ask people at trendy big tech companies why algorithms quizzes are mandatory, the most common answer I get is something like "we have so much scale, we can't afford to have someone...
Files are fraught with peril
Dan Luu12 Jul 2019
This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by...
How good are decisions? Evaluating decision quality in domains where evaluation is easy
Dan Luu21 Nov 2017
A statement I commonly hear in tech-utopian circles is that some seeming inefficiency can’t actually be inefficient because the market is efficient and inefficiencies will quickly be eliminated.