software engineering 👩‍💻 💯

By putting the database changes inside of a transaction, we can ensure that we either get all of the records or none of the records. We call that an atomic transaction: it happens completely or not at all.

Try to solve bugs one layer deeper

Imagine you have a React component in a dashboard, that deals with a User object retrieved from state, of the currently logged in user. You see a bug report in Sentry, where user was null during render. You could add a quick if (!user) return null . Or you could investigate a bit more, and find that your logout... See more

Software engineers never escape the skill-change vortex, even many years into their careers. Experienced engineers must learn and adopt technologies that didn't even exist when they started out. Developers must constantly retool themselves, even well after their formal education ends.

If you’re lucky, you will have many challenging moments in your career. Moments when you only understand a portion of the problem in front of you, when you know you’ll have to try a few things to see what works, when you aren’t fully confident that you can do the job. We’re lucky to have these moments because that’s how we grow. By pushing outside... See more

If you can’t easily explain why something is difficult, then it’s incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing

My favorite manager in my career had a habit of pressing me when I would claim something was difficult to implement. Often his response was something along the lines of “isn’t this just a matter of sending up X when we Y”, or... See more

Learn to deal with pressure

When you're in a real interview the world changes: You're locked in a cage with a lion. Every heartbeat is a gorilla bashing against the walls. Your mental gears gunk up as your body goes into fight or flight mode. Your clammy hands struggle to write half legible code on the white board. A threat hides behind every... See more

I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the... See more

Don’t underestimate the value of digging into history to investigate some bugs

I’ve always been pretty good at debugging weird issues, with the usual toolkit of println and the debugger. So I never really looked at git much to figure out the history of a bug. But for some bugs it’s crucial.

I recently had an issue with my server where it was leaking... See more

Bad code gives you feedback, perfect code doesn’t. Err on the side of writing bad code

It’s really easy to write terrible code. But it’s also really easy to write code that follows absolutely every best practice, which has been unit, integration, fuzz, and mutation-tested for good measure – your startup will just run out of money before you finish.... See more