Why is the Culture of Software Engineering So Loose?
A few months ago I finished reading the book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers. The book’s central idea is that there exists a spectrum of tight cultures and loose ...
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Recent Posts
The Quality Initiative and What Came of It
A few months ago, my immediate team started a new program, one very different from anything that existed in my past teams and past employers. The program was...
Effectively Onboarding New Engineers
Every software team has lots of ideas for what it could accomplish if only it had an extra headcount. However, teams don’t merely want just a new headcount; ...
What Does it Mean for Software to be Production-Grade?
It’s currently fall, which means that this year’s cohort of (fully remote) summer interns has recently finished their internships. I had a few interns in my ...
Factors Affecting Code Change Frequency
March 2021 was a dubious milestone in my software engineering career: it was my first month where I did not merge any changes to any codebase. This happened ...
Public School Habits Among Young Software Engineers
Transitioning from school to office life represents a significant cultural shift. I carried forward many of my old habits from the Ontario K-12 public educat...
Reflections on an Extended Work-From-Home Stint
In early March 2020, metro Seattle was hit with a local outbreak of COVID-19, the first notable cluster in North America. On the afternoon of March 4, we rec...
Defensive Programming for the Brain
As software engineers, we put lots of effort into defending our services from getting overwhelmed. We apply partitioning and load balancing to protect indivi...
The Historical Context Test for Technical Debt
Technical debt is often a nebulous and hazy concept. Almost every engineer would agree that the codebase they work on is full of technical debt, but those sa...
The Engineer’s Duty to be Invisible
It is said that bad technology is distracting while great technology is invisible. Anyone who works in software (or any business for that matter) has experie...
Feeding my Personal Journal into a Sentiment API
In early 2019 I began the habit of keeping a personal journal. Every day I would write about 20-40 sentences of text into a text file (yyyy-MM-dd.txt) outlin...
Avoiding Getting Frazzled as a Software Engineer
Software engineering can often make your brain hurt, especially if your brain is wired to over-process everything it receives. Information overload is perfec...
Best Practices for Rewriting a Microservice
In a previous post, I wrote about how component rewrites are long and costly undertakings that are only justifiable under specific circumstances. However, if...
Lessons Learned from Rewriting a Microservice
The full service rewrite is the ultimate software engineering fantasy. A rewrite offers a chance to wipe out all technical debt and redesign a system perfect...
The Road from Junior to Intermediate Developer
My current job title is “Software Engineer II”, a rank above entry-level but below senior. My promotion to level II surprised me when I first heard about it,...
The Highly Sensitive Programmer
The most influential book I read in 2018 was Elaine Aron’s “The Highly Sensitive Person”. The book answered many of my unsolved questions about myself by sho...
The Most Useful Courses I Took at Waterloo
It has been over a year and a half since I wrote the last final exam of my software engineering degree at the University of Waterloo. Now that I am in the wo...
Book Review: ‘The Mythical Man-Month’ by Fred Brooks
The Mythical Man-Month was the software engineering book most frequently referenced by my university professors. I recently had the chance to finally read it.
Lessons Learned from Writing a Chess Engine
My chess engine is my favorite on-again-off-again programming side project.