This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine. I write about software engineering and computer science topics. The usual suspects, I suppose.
This is the third post I’m making this year. Couple more and I can mark this new year’s resolution as done 🚀. For the rest of the year I want to zoom in on career development for software engineers and managers. I’ve thought a lot about this at an individual scale for both myself and for the folks I’ve been lucky to have on my team. And even on the scale of a whole organization for Bolt, while…
When I joined Stripe, my main point of reference as a manager was Bolt. It’s where I began my career as a manager and leader, and where I gained all of my experience.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to write more on this blog. After taking a break in 2023, I realized that I miss writing in public. Additionally, I have accumulated a decent backlog of rough ideas, so I have a plan of topics that I want to cover. I believe there are significant changes happening in the tech sector in Romania and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as a whole, so I want to delve a…
The following is a repost of an internal training I did for managers in my team at Bolt. All of us are pretty new to job, and I saw a lot of common points of confusion pop up. I thought it worthwhile to lay down more concretely the expectations on managers in Bolt engineering. Turns out the resulting doc has a wider applicability. So after much procrastination I’m putting it on the blog for more…
This is my review of Managing Humans . This is a book on management written by Michael Lopp , who is a well known internet writer on the software industry.
Teams in companies don’t exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are part of a larger organization. And getting this right is just as important and hard as getting teams right.
This is my review of The Hard Thing About Hard Things . Like with Accelerate or No Rules Rules I was not expecting much coming in, but was blown away by the book. There’s a lot of wisdom in here for sure.
Teams and team formation are a fundamental part of any organization. But getting them right is far from trivial. And there are a lot of ways to mess things up. So it’s important to have a “correct” definition for them. In my time at Bolt , I’ve been involved with managing, bootstrapping, and reorganizing my fair share of teams. I made all the mistakes. To save others from doing so I’ve written…
This is my review of Accelerate . I’ve long wanted to read this one. But I was procrastinating on it because in my mind I thought I’d already be familiar with its message. And to a degree that was the case. But I also found a lot of interesting information that I didn’t expect . Like the causal relationship between engineering practices and company outcomes. Both in the hard things like better…
Folks starting out on their management career or thinking about higher-level engineering roles such as Staff have a daunting task ahead of them. While much of the specifics vary company by company, there’s some fundamentals that tend to stay the same. Luckily “there have been whole books written about this stuff”! Even more luckily I’ve compiled a big list of books I’ve found useful that made it…
In a previous article in this series, we spoke about the types of software companies and some general strategies for your job search . Now it’s time to turn our attention to how companies organize their workforce. It turns out the tech industry has standardized the type and the scope of work engineers do to a large degree. Whether you’re outside or inside this system, knowing how it works is…
This is my review of Building Mobile Apps At Scale . I wanted to read this book to better understand the challenges of building complex mobile apps. My teams have relatively recently expanded to include mobile engineers, so I primarily wanted to have enough of a grounding in this tech space so I could have a decent conversation. Turns out a lot of the complexities are the same as in backend or web…
Early in my computing career, I came across a neat classification of software. It split things up into systems, applications, and scripts. Like all abstractions, it only gets you so far. But I’ve found it a useful conceptual model as an engineer and a manager. And it has interesting things to say about how software is built, how it’s used, and even who gets to write it.
This is my review of No Rules Rules . This is a book about Netflix and the culture they’ve built over there. The main idea is that their unique culture has allowed them to achieve their extraordinary results. And that this could work for your company too. Indeed, among the FAANGM companies, Netflix the most focused, most customer driven, and arguably the one impacting the cultural zeitgeist the…
A while ago I came across the concept of innovation tokens . It’s a neat and powerful idea. In short, you have a limited number of times you can innovate in any new project or company. Every time you do something new you spend one token. This can be using new technology or adopting new processes. Or it can even be how you define benefits in your company or going all-in on remote working. Of…
The type of software company you work for has a massive impact on your career. In the last article , we saw how your approach to interviewing can hold you back in your career. Working for the wrong type of company can have a similar effect. Working for the right type of company can act as a force multiplier. It can push you further than your skills alone could. And it can also provide on-the-job…
You might have heard of the “Netflix Keeper Test” . This is a part of their culture where a manager asks themselves if one of their reports were to leave, would they fight for them.
This is my review of A History Of The Ancient World . I had planned on doing more history reading in 2021. But the year whizzed by and I found myself in December having read nothing. A quick search for “top history books” surfaced a number of interesting choices. I chose this one because it covered a period of history I feel I don’t have a good grasp on - pre-Roman/Greek antiquity from the start…
I’ve prepared a major release, namely 0.8.0 . This is just the second release of the year, and the first in more than 10 months.
Over the last year, I’ve reached out to almost 1000 engineers trying to get them to interview for Bolt. I’ve had some success and plenty of failures. But I have learned a lot about how people approach interviews and career development. And I’ve identified seven “anti-patterns” that I think are detrimental to a successful career. In this article, I want to share these anti-patterns with you. I also…
This is my review of Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond The Management Track . It is a book about being a “staff engineer”. As far as I know, it is the only book about the topic. It is by Will Larson, the author of An Elegant Puzzle , and much like that book, it is a compilation of his writing on his blog , as well as his separate staffeng.com website.
On one of the Romanian developer forums I frequent a familiar question was raised - why do developers chose to leave Romania? This is a touchy topic here. After the fall of communism in 1989, and more especially after after joining the EU in 2007, there has been an exodus of sorts of people from Romania seeking a better life elsewhere. But mostly in the EU, the USA and Canada. This has had a…
This is my review of Atomic Habits . As the name implies it is a book on habits. It looks at how to effectively build good habits, and how to drop bad habits. It also makes the case that the habits one has are what determine success, rather than the goals one sets or the motivation one has.
This is my review of Crucial Conversations . It’s a relationships book with a lot of applicability in the workplace. It’s a nice read for managers, hence it got on my reading list.
This is my review of Team Topologies . It’s a management book (oh no, not again), which looks at some good patterns for organizing teams in larger organisations. It proposes a set of team types and team interaction modes between them which aim to maximize ownership, delivery, efficiency, etc.
This is my review of 21 Lessons For The 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s in a way a followup to his Sapiens and Homo Deus books. The former I read, but didn’t get around to writing a review here – no shameless self-linking today! Now, Sapiens focused on humanity’s past, and Homo Deus on its distant future. But this one has a bit of both, and manages to keep the focus on the near future -…
I’ve prepared a major release, namely 0.7.0 . Since I think I jumped some releases, I will also summarize the 0.6.x releases.
This is my review of Help Them Grow Or Watch Them Grow . This is a management book focused on the career growth aspects of the manager’s job. It’s a short book, and perhaps not a classic, but it is nonetheless a very worthwhile read and it’s had quite the impact on how I approach career conversations and career growth with my team.
This is my review of The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. This was a great read. I don’t think I’ve fully assimilated it yet, but I’ve made copious notes and will come back to them. But what I did manage to get out of it has both changed the way I see my job as a manager and solidified that some of the things I was doing were the right things.
This is my review of Clean Architecture by Uncle Bob. The book is undoubtedly a classic and I feel bad for not having read it earlier. I think it might have helped with a project or three. Better late than sorry for sure, and unlike other books I read too late (SICP primarily) I did feel I got a lot out of this book, and I came out a better developer on the other side. It certainly gave me a bunch…
Productionizing Spark streaming applications (2019) - we had to use Spark streaming for a project at Bolt , and this guide proved mighty useful for getting us in the right headspace for tackling the problem.
Why write ADRs (2020) - architecture decision records (ADRs) are a form of technical documentation. They cover the big technical decision made on a project, in a sort of syntehsized fashion. Much like a design doc, but without going into the nitty-gritty.
Taming floating point error (2020) - a brief overview of what error means in floating point and how it affects work. What I found most interesting was the discussion on error analysis and error propagation through a computation. This was one area I didn’t have a good mental model of how to approach from uni days, and it turns out that (at least conceptually) it is quite straightforward and…
This is my review of Radical Candor by Kim Scott. This is a management book as you can surely surmise. The central idea is that one should practice radical candor in a work environment - a style of interacting with others where one both seeks and offers good and constructive and sometimes hard to hear feedback.
I’ve prepared a minor release - 0.5.1 - which contains a lot of goodies for recurring tasks. This version introduces:
Why do ARM chips have instructions with JavaScript in the name (2018) - remember kids, if your programming language becomes popular enough, its primitive operations will become CPU instructions. I wonder if there’s been any analysis done on this? Like look at where a sufficient sample of programs spend their time and make that into instructions. You’d need a size/complexity heuristic to not just…
OAuth 2.0 and OpenId Connect in plain english (2018) #video - A gentle guide to these protocols for managing authorization / identity and its delegation. It’s one of those things every developer building web applications should know about, but there’s a dearth of good material out there.
More testable code with the hexagonal architecture #video (2019) - the hexagonal architecture is the name given to an clean and interesting approach to building large “business” applications. There is essentially a core of logic, surrounded by “ports” for persistency, communication, etc. and “adapters” that allow the logic to make use of the ports.
As promised, the 0.5.0 release comes much faster than the 0.4.2 one. It includes a single change, namely smart list . It’s a significant addition however, and the first foray outside task-planning for Jupiter.
This is my review of Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton. It’s another book on negotiation, and it’s the second in the series I review, after Never Split The Difference . This is the original which started the whole trend.
Today marks the date of the fourth “minor” release of Jupiter - version 0.4.2 . It’s a massive release, and the last one I’ll make this massive! It literally has tens of big changes, and took about 5 months to deliver! Not cool for such a small project.
This is my review of Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss. This is a book on negotiation and it’s written by the former head negotiator of the FBI. So the credentials are quite good, and I think the author delivers.
When you should NOT use Rails (2020) - I’ve never used Ruby on Rails, but it does seem like a great tool - opinionated, powerful, flexible, etc. However, like all tools it has its place and might not be good in “all circumstances”. Folks sometimes forget this. The linked article talks a couple of such situations, and what alternatives there are.
Technology holy wars are coordination problems (2020) - a point about how and when holy-wars in technology appear. Basically when there’s multiple competing ecosystems, and choosing one will mean the others will wither and suffer.
Every Jurassic Park dinosaur illustrated with modern science (2020) - a fun and quite long article analysing what we’ve learned about dinosaurs since Jurassic Park (and what we’ve known all along, but got wrong anyway). Spoilers - velociraptors are about chicken-size. The end of OS X (2020) - WWDC happend and Apple announced they’re gonna drop Intel and Mac OS 11. It’s an interesting take - Mac OS…
It’s been quite some time since one of these. It’s more like a monthly blast for a while. I’ll try to do better in the future.
This is my review of “Work Rules” by Laszlo Bock. The author is the former head of HR at Google - or of people operations as they’re known there. The book aims to present what makes Google special from this point of view, such that it’s consistently considered one of the best places to work in the world, and what other companies might learn from their approach.
It’s been quite some time since one of these.