Zain Rizvi
Interested in software engineering, business, or psychology? You're in the right place
Latest posts
Want to make a feature change to PyTorch?
With such a large number of commits coming in, PyTorch needs a process for managing it all to keep the codebase maintainable. For smaller changes, like a five line bug fix, this takes the form of a regular PR review. For larger changes, we prefer a Request for Comments
The Software Engineer's Career Ladder
What's expected of you when you're a junior, senior, or staff software engineer, and what it takes to rise up in the ranks.
Insider's Guide to Passing FAANG Interviews
My 12+ years as both the interviewer and interviewee at Google, Microsoft, and Stripe taught me one thing: Standard interviewing advice falls woefully short. Grinding interview questions isn't enough. Here's what to do.
PARA vs Zettelkasten: The false binary
Why Software Engineers like Woodworking
Your confusion is the litmus test
How to slay a Hydra: Finishing projects
This project was supposed to be easy, why do I keep running into brick walls?!? Ok, how do I work around this one without compromising my vision?
Falsehoods programmers believe about time zones
I decided to make a time zone converter. It had seemed like an easy project, but I was horribly mistaken
How banks help scammers with their bad UI
My sister wanted a summer job before starting college. Instead she was scammed out of thousands
Never Focus on the User
User focused design is wasteful. Every business knows this, but they're afraid to admit it. It's is a PR friendly way to say they focus on their buyers
Taking my own Advice
How I learned to turn Impostor Syndrome into an Advantage - The Impostor's Advantage
My heart was racing. My palms sweating. I was going to be fired.\nPerformance reviews had just ended, and it was time to meet my manager and be told my results. Except I knew what it would say. How else do you rate a programmer who doesn’t code?
I couldn’t abandon another side project
I didn't want this to become another abandoned project. By trying to do less stuff, I got more done
Effective Altruism is Suboptimal
What a homeless cametaught me about caring for others
Dangerous Professionals: Hacking the Bureaucracy to Get Stuff Done
The Dangerous Professional finds the seams between the policies, and slips inside them to Get Stuff Done
What's it like as a Senior Engineer at Google?
When I started working at Microsoft, fresh out of college, coding was my life. Writing code was the easiest way to build any cool thing that my brain could imagine. When I thought about what I’d want to do for the rest of my life I thought that I just wanted to keep coding.\n\nI was wrong
Interview advice that got me offers from Google, Microsoft, and Stripe
Remembering what you Read: Zettelkasten vs P.A.R.A.
I spent over a year researching better ways to take notes and remember what I read. Here's what I found.
Quickly Building Products for ACTUAL Customers
The Truth about VPC Security Controls
So you want to do Deep Work?
In this information era where all mechanical tasks are being automated, in order to be successful you need to be able to do what machines cannot: be creative. And creativity is something you can generate on demand through deep work, and in his book “Deep Work” Cal explains how you can achieve it.