Aids vs. Abstractions
Every year, we developers get access to better and fancier tools to do our jobs. I’m really excited – there’s a big opportunity here for us to be able to deliver software faster and with higher quality!
Sid Shanker’s Blog
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Latest posts
Teaching Stable Diffusion about Myself
[scroll down if you just want to get to the images]
Choosing a High Impact Team
Working at Twitter was a huge change for me – prior to working there, I had only worked at small-ish startups. Something that I didn’t appreciate as I made that switch was how important what team you join is.
Unmute Yourself From Anywhere
We’ve all been there. You’re on a video call, and someone says “Sid, what do you think?” Of course, at the moment I am reading the slides they sent (and absolutely not on Twitter), and it takes me a few flustered seconds to find my way back to Google Hangouts.
The Power of a Good Problem Statement
At Twitter, I read and wrote a lot of technical design documents – documents that describe a high-level approach to solving a particular problem. One of the key determining factors as to whether a doc was effective or not was how well written the problem statement in the document is.
An MVP Approach to Learning
I’ve been playing guitar on-and-off for the last few years, but this year decided to take things more seriously. I’ve been taking in-person lessons, but also have been watching a lot of YouTube content.
Building an NYC Subway Arrivals Board
For a while, I’ve wanted to have an easy way to see what trains are arriving at my subway station, so I know when I need to leave my house.
Rewatching ‘A Whole New World’
I just rewatched Gary Bernhardt’s incredible 2012 talk ‘A Whole New World’. This is absolutely one of my favorite tech talks of all time – and it holds up. Before I start gushing about this talk, unlike your average tech talk, this talk has a twist. So you might want to give it a watch before reading any further!
Notes: The Leprechauns of Software Engineering
I’ve recently been frustrated by the lack of rigor in discussions of software engineering practices. For any topic that might trend on programming Twitter (How should we interview people? Are integration tests worth it?) you’ll find hundreds of opinions, often informed by little more than personal opinion.
Notes: Meaningful Availability
It happens in all complex web applications – the service you are operating goes down, and users are affected. In order to fix these outages, and prevent them from happening, software teams need to have some way of measuring “how bad” an outage is. Metrics for “availability” – which is a measure how much of the time a site is “up” have been around for a while, but in the paper “Meaningful…