If you have followed this newsletter for a while, you would notice I usually recommend software engineers pursue a Jerry Maguire “Help me Help you…

February 2023

A good unit test should be: Idempotent: It’s every engineer favorite word :) Meaning it can be run over and over and is always green…
Outage management is a core skill for a software engineer to acquire and is critical to achieve high availability of an online service. First, ideally…
There is no magic bullet for clean readable code but these are tips that usually overwhelmingly increase code readability. 1) Declaration close to usage…
If you have ever seen a great chef cooking, you will see a pattern. Every couple of chops, every couple of minutes, the chef cleans up his station. He…

January 2023

Often times, software engineers are faced with the prospect of adding new functionalities or checking in new code that seems to be beneficial but are…
A sad topic for today: Layoffs. Layoffs are necessary when the future of a company is at risk and need to reduce its expenses to survive and compete in…
This is my take on software engineering ladders and what it takes to be promoted from one band to another. Software Engineer I: You are tasked and are…
If you find yourself in a team that needs to largely increase in size (happened to me twice at Uber) whether at a big company or a rising startup, you…

November 2022

One solid practice to have while coding is to fix a bug and at the same time write a unit test that would have uncovered it. It is a sign of solid…
First of all, happy thanksgiving. I am grateful to have started this newsletter this year. It has given me a medium to share my technical posts and…
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If you work long enough as a software engineer you will end up doing a migration from one system to another. Below is a step by step guide on how to…