Recent content on Daniel Sada Caraveo | Developer Productivity & Culture
I was reading Marianne Bellotti’s Kill It with Fire when I found a description of COBOL that sounded strangely familiar: COBOL was a language built for people who did not want to understand how the computer worked; they just wanted to get the job done. Today, we would probably call those people vibe coders. That comparison might sound insulting to COBOL programmers, vibe coders, or both. I…
»> go to watolls «< I live in Washington State. Whenever I am rushing to get to a meeting or needing to get somewhere fast, I sometimes take toll roads to get there faster. As I took them more, I noticed that I didn’t know what time to take them to get to my destination with the minimum payment possible. Some mornings I would leave at 8 and pay more than if I left at 7 for the…
Eight years ago, I started with a challenge called “100 Days of Algorithms”. My main goal was to reinforce my algorithm learning from my CS career by taking Princeton’s Algorithms I and II classes taught by Robert Sedgewick, by implementing some algorithms that looked interesting or I could learn something about them. At the time, I wrote in the readme: Hello! I’ve covered…
Once upon a time, I got a PR from a coworker, I’ll call him Mike. Mike sent me a 1600 line pull-request with no tests, entirely written by AI, and expected me to approve it immediately as to not to block him on his deployment schedule. When asking for tests, I’d get pushback on “why do I need tests? It works already”. Then, I’d get a ping from his manager asking on…
Recently, a study made the Hacker News’ front page mentioning that 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. There was ample discussion on whether it was GenZ collecting aesthetic objects or a fashion statement. They are not wrong, but I wanted to share why I bought a vinyl without a record player. I own four vinyl records. I’ve never played a single one in my house,…
Do you remember MapReduce? That distributed computing pattern that powered early Google and Hadoop? “Mapping” a lot of tasks to some compute clusters, then “reducing” the results? Well, I’ve been experimenting with applying the same concept to AI tasks using Claude Code, and the results have been surprisingly powerful. This is already being used to generate RAGs, but…
Back in the day, I was on a team that was allergic to change. Every small process improvement or tweak was deeply resented by team members, and it was hard to make progress. Tracking our tasks? Standups? Scrum? Writing status updates asynchronously? Whatever it was, the team was reluctant to try it out. The best manager I’ve ever had, tricked us with the experiment framework. Let’s try…
When you join Microsoft, you hear stories about people who’ve been there for 20 years, who grew up with the company, who never had to worry about sudden changes (maybe except for 2008). The performance management system had its quirks, but there was an understanding that if you did solid work, you’d have a place. But something shifted. Maybe it was the market, maybe it was the pressure…
After going in deep in product, I found myself drawn to a different challenge: making other developers more productive. As one of my biggest mentors would always say: “Developer productivity is always ‘Multiplier work’, especially in places where you have a lot of developers. By saving a couple minutes from every developer, every day, you’ve saved years of human life…
The In-Between: From Founder to Employee After I got my full time offer in Microsoft, I sold my company and moved to work full-time on Microsoft OneNote. I also took time to travel through South America and explore Mexico. Being in those months is like a limbo, expectant of something new coming, yet agressively trying to live in the present. Nevertheless, I started at Microsoft as a Software…
“When they say ‘be your own boss’ what they don’t tell you is that you’re trading one boss for dozens. Each client becomes your new manager, and some are far more demanding than any corporate supervisor could ever be.” Opening my company and consulting. While my Microsoft internships provided structure and resources, I was simultaneously running my own company…
“There I was, sitting in a Project Management class, watching my professor demonstrate Microsoft Project; the same software I had just spent my summer adding features to. Some education happens in classrooms; the best happens in the wild.” One of the strange things of college, is that before I started, I already had worked for some time in the field, as well as had some coding for some…
Little elephant company — 7 people working out of a random house — 2013 I know we haven’t paid you for 30 days, but would you be willing to float another month? No, sorry, I’m out. Ok, sad to see you are not loyal to the company. No pay, no work It was the end of 2013; I’d gone two paychecks without pay. The client still hadn’t paid, I wasn’t about to start working…
There I was, a kid giving the speech for my committee in Berkeley University. Twelve hundred heads looked at me in the auditorium. I felt my cheeks blush. After traveling 3,000 miles from my high school, we were representing Mexico in Berkeley Model UN. I got selected to give a talk to all the attendees. It was a new record in the amount of people I’d talk to at that time.
You know when you are on a hike, and there is a point where you are exactly midway through it? There is always a reflection moment in there, where some thinking happens. Sometimes you look back and realize: it’s been a long journey so far, hasn’t it? I recently turned 30, which, like all numbers that arbitrarily end with a zero, is a special time for reflection. For funsies and to…
I was born and raised in Mexico City, and I often get the question of what are my favorite places or plans to visit in Mexico City I enjoy that are compatible with foreigners and shine a light on some of the things Mexico has to offer. Recommended Day 1 - Zocalo and Bellas Artes: Get to Bellas Artes (palace of fine arts). Go in, see the nice paintings, then when you head outside, to the left, you…
While I was working in OneNote, one of the things the organization wanted to improve was developer productivty. We would conduct a survey called DevSat and get a general developer satisfaction score, measured in Net Satisfaction (NSAT) 1. The EVP would sit every week in this meeting to make sure this developer satisfaction was high across all teams in Microsoft. Microsoft is convinced that there…
Hello! I’m Daniel Sada. I like to write here. I like to sleep at night knowing my services are OK, I’ve written blog posts about software that saves me more than 100 hours of time and I used to be a OneNote Services developer. I’ve tried every coffee shop in a 25 mile radius around my house. I write in English and Spanish. I work at Snowflake improving Developer Productivity.
I’m writing here to list some of the mexican candy I’ve given, as well as allergens and a little bit of context about em. Basically all things here might contain nuts, so proceed at your own risk. Alegria Amaranth with honey, a.k.a “mexican rice krispies” but instead of rice, amaranth. Cocada Coconut and sweetened condensed milk, it reminds me of being in the beach, Dulce…
Five years ago (how time flies) I made a blog post about programs that have saved me 100+ hours, after uploading my article to HackerNews Thread 1 Thread 2 a lot of people responded with their favorite programs that have saved them 100+ hours. I went out and took the best ones and compiled them into this list. AutoHotKey AutoHotKey is a free, open-source scripting language for Windows that allows…
In memoriam, avus magni. Algunas personas tienen una urna, otras un sepulcro, otras quieren su nombre tallado en una banca o calle. Yo quiero hacer un recuerdo en digital de mi abuelo que falleció la ultima semana de junio para compartir lo hermoso que fue compartir la vida con él. Este texto también existe en mi blog, danielsada (punto) tech para el futuro. – Una de las cosas más características…
“Comprar una computadora es igual que comprar un automóvil, es muy dificil escoger el correcto y salir de la tienda sabiendo que fue la mejor opción” - Carlos Cerdeira Muchos de mis amigos invierten una cantidad considerable de su dinero para comprar una laptop ”potente” pero al final, cuando llegan a casa a usarla, esta igual o más lenta que la anterior. Por lo que me he decidido a hacer una guía…
Soy un usuario promedio: ¿Que app debería usar? Ideal: Signal - porque no recaba datos tuyos y no puede ver tus mensajes es lo mas seguro. Expertos en computacion pueden ver directamente el código que usa (github.com/signalapp) por lo que sabemos que es seguro. Tambien es el que usan periodistas y gente de wikileaks que necesita tener su información segura. Mejor: Whatsapp - Mientras que Whatsapp…
I recently graduated, and in order to get my official graduation title I needed to get my private and public key from the government. That’s right, you go to the government’s office, certify that you are who you are, and you’ll get a private and public key in an USB key from the government which you can use to do all your bureaucracy. You also get a TaxID which is comprised of
Hey everyone, here’s a .aftemplate file for you to download that includes all of the Display Google Ads templates. Edit November 25 2020: It seems there is a bug which generates an extra pixel when exporting, you need to put it in a integer (not decimal) X and Y position for it to export to the right size. I’ve updated the file with correct X and Y positions.
Ahora que vivimos en una sociedad global, hacer tu curriculum vitae es mucho más dificil, debido a que los regionalismos que tenemos en cada una de las partes del mundo para aplicar a los trabajos, no son adecuados (e incluso ofensivos) para ciertas compañías globales. Asimismo, quiero dar algunos de los puntos mas importantes para formular un CV que me han ayudado a través de los años. Quita la…
Over my work in different scales of services, I’ve noticed that there is a common pattern in some of these services that makes them easier to approach and cause less headaches to the engineers that handle them. When we deal with millions of users making requests all the time across the world, I’ve noted that there are a few things that help a lot of people to sleep at night…
Cynicism, distrust, skepticism, doubt, disbelief; an inclination to question whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile; pessimism. At some point in our lives, we find cynics on our environment: “I don’t believe we can do this thing” or “I really think we shouldn’t do that”, “Why bother going and doing it, we are not going to succeed…
No suelo quejarme mucho, sin embargo, varias cosas me han irritado en cómo los bancos que proclaman ser tan conocedores en ciberseguridad tienden a ser los que más caen en falsedades que solo aparentan seguridad. Mas aún, sus malas prácticas suelen llegar al punto que, en lugar de hacer los sistemas más seguros, los hacen más inseguros. No me malinterpreten, – Santander es de los mejores bancos…
After 3 internships In Microsoft, (and becoming a senior intern in the process) I’ve decided to write a blog post about what I’ve learned in three summers here. First: What did I do in three internships? For my first internship, I worked in the Microsoft Project Server, using SQL clustered indexes and optimizing our endpoint for consuming project tasks. For my second internship, I…
Have you ever had a hard drive which runs out of space while there is still space remaining? Have you ever wondered where that space goes? Let me show you a magic trick First I’ll save a message in message.txt Nothing here nothing there, I’ll save two secret messages the first one is a secret, the second one a big file of text. (but I could save a jpg or an exe).
Sometimes when we are making backups on our files, and specially if you are a Node.js developer, you’ll suffer whilst copying your repositories to another place for making a backup. (Provided you don’t have git for all your repositories) Just do: rsync -av --exclude 'node_modules' source destination And you are set. You could also exclude some other things like adding adding gitignore…
As tradition follows, we usually get screenings of interesting movies in class, today we got a screening of Moon Machines [1] a documentary by the science channel about the Apollo Guidance system and their corresponding code.This documentary was about the testimonies of people in MIT and the general creation of the whole Apollo mission. What is interesting is that some years ago, I saw a GitHub…
In my InfoSec class, we were asked to show a preliminary attempt at google hacking. We were tasked to try to get some indices of google hacking performed, to show us the importance of monitoring our site’s search engine exposure and possible file requests permissions. Examples included: site:something filename:admin.php While it certainly is something that sounds fun, for me this is more of…
Since I wrote this, there has been two HN threads on this blog, they contain super useful links and programs, go see them! Thank you for reading! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13887237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849208 Along the year I’ve been working on several web platforms where repetitive tasks are usually the norm. From batch optimizing a thousand images, to changing…
I found this quote interesting, it was made by reddit user /u/Bytewave, he is a Senior Engineer in a well positioned Telco in Canada. He posts his stories and experiences to reddit. I often found a hell of a lot of Passive-Agressive CCing and I find that his opinion is relevant. “Passive-aggressive CCing (where you copy ‘important people’ who do not need to be involved in an issue to throw weight…
Being my dream to work for one of the Big 4, since an early age I stated to learn the skill-set I’d need in order to be interviewed in Microsoft. This blog intends to be a little recap of the things you can do to make your possibility of entering a Big 4, far greater. Early in October, Microsoft came to my campus for recruiting. We had a very cool coding contest, and did good enough to get…
When you work in the software industry, indubitably you will find the (now very famous)BOFH, and Clients from Hell material, where a technical person complains about a client. Whether they asked for an impossible thing or software that doesn’t even make sense, the common mood (or at least what I get from them) is that the client is somewhat stupid, or short sighted. I don’t want to discuss…
With all the new technologies emerging for cloud migration, there is a wide acceptance that cloud services are the cheapest, and best way to manage some kinds of infrastructures. Nevertheless, on the decision on wether we should migrate into cloud must still be analysed in other ways. That’s why the current Milk-as-a-Service analogy is great, as it illustrates the downfalls of moving to…