As an engineering leader, I’ve seen the following pattern play out multiple times, across multiple companies Executives complain about engineering velocity not being high enough. “I just want to show the user’s birthday on the settings page. Why does that take a whole year?” Engineers respond that tech debt is holding them back Executives tell … Continue reading Tech debt can’t be solved as a roadmap item. It needs to be part of your daily routine
Tag: Software
Moneyball for Software Teams – An Imperfect Heuristic for Quantifying Dev Performance
Someone on Reddit once asked for “unethical career advice” for software developers. Here’s the most highly rated answer with over two thousand people liking it: Make a good first impression and you're set for a while. Something takes longer? They're a good developer so I guess we under pointed that. It is actually insane to … Continue reading Moneyball for Software Teams – An Imperfect Heuristic for Quantifying Dev Performance
Our Engineering Principles and Best Practices
As the CTO for an early-stage startup, I had put together a version-1 of the Principles and Best Practices for our engineering team. Most of these are borne out of my past work experiences at a variety of companies, including two of the FANGs. There are many great things I've learnt from these companies. But … Continue reading Our Engineering Principles and Best Practices
My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
One of the watershed moments of my life was as a 20 year old intern attending a workplace presentation about personal finance. Over the course of one hour, I learnt about the power of buy-and-hold investing and compound growth. I learnt that even an average engineer with a five-figure salary can become a millionaire by … Continue reading My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
The Law of Net Design Costs
Suppose you’re working on a software system and need to implement user-logins using a userID and password. After a bit of research, you narrow it down to two possible options. Your first option is to implement it yourself - hash/salt the password, store it in a database that you manage, and use it to authenticate … Continue reading The Law of Net Design Costs
Mutation Driven Testing – When TDD Just Isn’t Good Enough
As someone who loves discussing Software Craftsmanship and best practices, Test Driven Development (TDD) is a bit of a sore spot for me. Let me start off by saying that I love TDD’s emphasis on testing. Too many software projects skimp on testing. And the results speak for themselves many years down the road, when … Continue reading Mutation Driven Testing – When TDD Just Isn’t Good Enough
Why Is There So Much Crap Software In The World
All around us, we are surrounded by crappy software. Pension funds that are stumbling along using decades old batch scripts with faulty assumptions. Credit agencies have leaked over a hundred million social security numbers and other confidential data. Planes need to be rebooted every 51 days to prevent "potentially catastrophic" bugs.And not to even mention … Continue reading Why Is There So Much Crap Software In The World
If Founders Treated Their Investors The Same Way They Treated Their Employees
Founder: Hey Joe! How are you doing? Everyone here loved meeting you, and we would really love to have you on board as our investor! We really respect your expertise, and think this could be a great partnership. What do you say? Investor: Glad to hear! Can you give me more details about how much … Continue reading If Founders Treated Their Investors The Same Way They Treated Their Employees
Preventing Software Rot
I recently came across a story that is just as amusing as it is shocking: One of my clients is responsible for several of the world's top 100 pension funds. They had a nightly batch job that ... crashed. No one knew what was wrong at first. This batch job had never, ever crashed before, … Continue reading Preventing Software Rot
When Feature Flags Do And Don’t Make Sense
Over the past years, I’ve worked in multiple teams adopting very different strategies when it comes to feature flags. I’ve seen the pros and cons of both, and over time, I found myself disagreeing with any fundamentalist position on their use. There is a lot of nuance to this topic, and I think it is … Continue reading When Feature Flags Do And Don’t Make Sense
Software the Hard way 