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**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, sure. So this was a pretty opinionated post I wrote, and I was honestly shocked that the reception was so positive. I thought people would be very negative on it. So maybe it's less controversial than I think... \[laughs\] But the idea that I have here is that -- well, one, you shouldn't leave ... |
So instead of commenting in 30 different places and saying "Oh, here you've used map filter where you should be using reduce... You should leave one comment saying "This is a pattern that you should adopt." And that way the person can kind of like treat it a bit more holistically. That's something I believe. |
The other thing that people do, I think, is that when they review a pull request, they read through the diff and they review the diff. And I think that's a big mistake. I think the most interesting and most useful comments you can give in a code review are not about the diff. They're about the code that wasn't written,... |
The highest value code reviews I've ever seen have been comments like "You just don't need to do this, because we have this system here that you could use instead." Or sometimes "You've built this system in this place, which I can see why you did that, but it's much, much better to build it here, for these general high... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So that second one is, I think, super-powerful. And I certainly am guilty of just reviewing the diff, and so I'm feeling very seen by this one. And I coached in basketball, Sean... I've got young boys playing basketball, I've been coaching for years... And so as you coach, you try to figure out h... |
\[54:17\] And what was way more powerful when I realized I need to be looking at it from a bigger scope and actually telling them what they could have done instead, not what they did right or wrong, but actually they're not seeing this part of the court, or "Here's a better way where you could avoid this thing altogeth... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah. I mean, for sure. But that's why it's so valuable, because you're bringing to bear your understanding of the entire system. That's why code reviews with that context are so much better, because they're harder, because they incorporate kind of a broader understanding. |
**Jerod Santo:** That makes tons of sense. So how long have you been working at GitHub? |
**Sean Goedecke:** Oh, five years... Four years. |
**Jerod Santo:** Four or five years. And in that time I assume you've done code reviews, so you've done political influence... You've done the things -- you're not just writing about the stuff, you're actually doing the stuff, right? |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, yeah, I'd say so... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I'm just making sure. I mean, obviously, right? But I want to make sure that's the case. Sometimes we just have color commentaries, and they're not actually out there doing the work. So that's probably one of the reasons why you're so good at it, is because you're actually living the life. |
Have you ever been unable to convince inside GitHub something that you want to happen or change, and you thought "I know what I'll do. I'll write a blog post about this. It'll make the front page of Hacker News, and then maybe some of my superiors will read it and I can influence change in that way"? What about that, S... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Oh ,man... If I've ever done that, it's by accident. I try really, really hard to do the exact opposite of that. I do not write about things I've worked on in like the last year... I try really hard to not give examples from GitHub, from the company I'm currently working at... I am so, so paranoid ab... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's like the most passive-aggressive thing you can do, is like blog vaguely, veil it, that you're blogging about one of your co-workers, or your boss, or something... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Exactly. And they do read my blog, many of my co-workers. |
**Jerod Santo:** I assume they do. That was kind of -- my question was facetious, but... I guess the real thing is there, is like at a certain point when you have a blog like yours, which has become very well-read, you have more influence; not just inside of your political team there at GitHub or wherever you're workin... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, it's scary... I mean, because I still -- you've been working in the industry twice as long as me. Many of my colleagues have been working in the industry longer than me. Plenty of people have experience I don't have. I'm writing from where I'm at. But I don't claim to have all the answers. I sp... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[57:57\] Well, you're very good at what you do... This is why guys like me, who've been doing it twice as long as you have, still want to read what you have to say... Because not only do you have a good head on your shoulders, but you're very good at explaining it in ways that are just easy to read, a... |
Are there any posts you have - and you said before the show started, or maybe it was on the show, I don't know anymore - that you had 13 or so drafts going on. Here we are, November 5th, 2025, getting towards the tail end of the year... What are you thinking about right now? What's on your mind? What do your drafts loo... |
**Sean Goedecke:** I don't think I have anything super-controversial in the queue. I tend to write my controversial posts as quickly as possible and I publish them. If something's sitting in drafts, it's probably because it's insufficiently controversial, and I'm trying to think of a way to make it a bit punchier. |
But, I mean, one thing that I've been noodling on for a while is my take on the idea that getting the main thing right is so important. This is a draft I've had sitting in my drafts for a month, that -- like, you can be like a grinder, you can be like heads down, 100% doing what you think is like good work, 12 hours a ... |
And one thing I've sort of grappled with is "Do I deserve my job in those periods where I'm working comparatively fewer hours? Am like cheating my company out of my labor?" And one thing I console myself with is "Well, maybe I'm only doing -- this day I only really got four hours of work in, but it was all in the right... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's completely fair. I would say -- my response to that would be it depends on what your company is hiring you to do. That is, of course, contextual to that agreement, but assuming it's a typical tech company who writes and sells or rents software as a service like GitHub does, they're probably hiri... |
\[01:02:23.26\] And so being on the right path and doing the right thing is like -- that's the name of the game. And grinding in the wrong direction isn't getting any value. Sometimes, however, you don't know you're grinding in the wrong direction. And so you've just gotta grind until you find out this wasn't right. Ot... |
**Sean Goedecke:** I'm comfortable in my relationship with my employer, but... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's great. Great to hear. It sounds like with good reason. I do know that when you're on the main thing, though, you can make major progress really quickly... And you can accomplish a lot in a small amount of time, because it's so highly leveraged. Like, what we do is highly leveraged. And so that's... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, sometimes I think about it like this, where particularly the more senior you get, if you do one genuinely useful thing a week, that puts you ahead of, I think, most engineers. When I say genuinely useful, I mean like a contribution that would not have happened without you. That is in the right ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, it's like that old commercial where the guy saved a nickel... Do you remember this one? He's running around, |
"I saved us a nickel. I saved us a nickel." He's like running around the office, and nobody cares. They're like "Dude, it's a nickel." Nobody cares. And then finally, he walks past like three of the higher ups, and he's saying "I saved us a nickel. |
I saved us a nickel." And the right person heard it, and he's like "We do that operation 17,000 times a day", or something like that. The nickel was being saved at a scale. Nobody realized it. I can't remember what the commercial was even about... But I do remember that, because when I talk about leverage - like, there... |
I don't know if you saw the post, Sean, recently, the TikTok intern who saved them 300K a year rewriting a very small part of their service from Go to Rust. Did you see that post? |
**Sean Goedecke:** No, I didn't. But it doesn't surprise me. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So there's an opportunity there, where this person comes in for an intern... Of course, they were assigned this task, I believe... And it's like this one particular endpoint of a thing, where it's just -- like, 95% of TikTok is written in Go, I believe, according to that post... And so lots of Go... |
\[01:06:02.09\] Now, it was an intern, so is it a unique contribution? Like, probably a lot of people at that org could have written that particular program. It's just cool that an intern got to do it and write about it. But it's an example of what you're talking about, where it's like, if you can bring 300K a year in ... |
**Sean Goedecke:** I mean, it's easier to do that in some roles than others, for sure. I can't talk a lot about it, but one of the really interesting things about working for Copilot, working in like the Copilot area at GitHub has been just the ridiculous growth that Copilot has had financially. And you're very rapidly... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. It is a high stakes game, which makes it all the scarier, knowing the status of the industry and the lack of sometimes resiliency. The lack of resiliency, and the overwhelming desire to go faster, faster, faster, and to keep up, and to pass. And how much is on the line now. I mean, if you look at... |
**Sean Goedecke:** What else? I have this -- this is one of those things where... What is it? Was it W.H. Auden who said that enjoying your own handwriting is like enjoying the smell of your own farts... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Sean Goedecke:** I think the equivalent of that for blogging is writing posts about blogging, and writing posts about the experience. So I try to do that as rarely as possible, but I have this draft I've been working on about how to write posts that blow up on the internet, and how to write posts that will hit the to... |
**Jerod Santo:** This is genuine advice, or this is sarcastic advice? |
**Sean Goedecke:** No, no, genuine advice. |
**Jerod Santo:** Genuine. Well, you mean, you have the ability to do it clearly, you've done it on a repeated basis... So your advice -- you have the clout. What is your summary? Give us the quick list. What do you do? How do you do it? Are you trying to do it, first of all? |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, I'd say so. I wouldn't say I'm click-baiting, but I want people to read what I write, and one way to do that is to have it appear in these aggregators like the Changelog, like Hacker News, all these other places. It's hard to say, but a big part of it is finding the exact right tone to hit. You... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[01:10:26.03\] Make the point. |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah. The title has to make the point for you. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Sean Goedecke:** But the title can't be too punchy, because then you end up in a situation where you have more comments than upvotes on the post... And as soon as you get more comments than upvotes, it triggers the Hacker News flame war mechanism, and your post just gets annihilated off the front page. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay... |
**Sean Goedecke:** So you have to kind of -- you've got to be really careful about doing things like asking questions in your title, but you also want your title to be punchy enough, because most people aren't going to read the article. So it's this kind of fine line to walk. The whole process -- I did write a blog pos... |
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