/Career Advice

Looking Back At Two Years At Automattic And Tumblr

- Vicki Boykis tl;dr: "For the past two years, I’ve been building and breaking recommender systems at Wordpress and Tumblr. I’m starting a new adventure soon, but this scope of work has been the most meaningful and fun of my career so far, and I wanted to reflect on a few things I’m taking away." Vicki discusses her takeaways about ML, people, culture, communication, and the joys of engineering. 

featured in #337

Ergonomic Tips From A Full-Time Programmer

- Matyáš Racek tl;dr: (1) Get a standing desk. (2) Get a good keyboard. (3) Setup shortcuts or learn Vim the author shows us his AutoHotkey setting. (4) Ergonomic chairs don't really work. (5) Big monitor and big text. And more. 

featured in #337

How To Estimate Disk Space

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will recalls one the best architecture interviews he's been in, "where the candidate was able to significantly narrow down the possible solutions by asking for a few details: queries per second, expected number of rows, and necessary columns." Will demonstrates how he would approach this question. 

featured in #336

How To Present To Executives

tl;dr: "Presenting to executives can be intimidating, and this might be more advice than helpful. If you want to boil it all down to one concise tip: send an early draft to an executive attending the meeting and ask them what to change. If you listen to and apply that feedback, you’ll figure out the other pieces as you go." Will also provides a framework to use, as well as other tips. 

featured in #334

Downturn Career Decisions

- Will Larson tl;dr: "My general advice to folks would be to stay where you are as long as you’re reasonably happy day to day and feel like you’re learning at a good rate. Even if your effective compensation has declined a bit, it’s very hard to determine if the compensation at any other company will hold up either. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re unhappy for non-compensation reasons, then of course you should find another role." Will provides advice to both managers and ICs on navigating career decisions in the current climate. 

featured in #332

16 Bell-Curve Opinions On Engineering

- Matt Rickard tl;dr: (1) You should always use Kubernetes and other "correct" infrastructure. (2) Technical debt is bad and should be avoided at all costs. (3) We need to build an internal developer platform that abstracts cloud APIs away from our developers. And more. 

featured in #331

Eigenquestions: The Art of Framing Problems

- Matt Hudson Shishir Mehrotra tl;dr: 3 techniques for expert framing, including Eigenquestion, when one critical decision has ten related questions. The Eigenquestion is the question that, if answered, answers all the subsequent questions as well, discussed in more detail here.

featured in #330

Learning HTML Was Too Hard So I Made A Compiler Instead

- Austin Henley tl;dr: "I was struggling to learn how to design web pages with HTML in 5th grade so I set off to make my own language. Yep. But that meant I first had to learn how to code and then learn how to make a compiler. It took about 10 years! Fun ensues."

featured in #330

So You Want to Become a Sales Engineer?

- Allen Vailliencourt tl;dr: What is the mystery behind the Sales Engineer career path, what makes it exciting, and how do you get here? This post dives into a typical day in the life of a Sales Engineer and gives tips on how you can jumpstart your career in Pre-Sales.

featured in #329

Learning A Technical Subject

- Murat Demirbas tl;dr: Murat believes cultivating the following attitudes helps navigate learning more easily: (1) curiosity, (2) relentlessness, (3) being a hands-on maker, (4) being social & learning to communicate well, (5) analyzing and drawing lessons, (6) leveraging previous experience. 

featured in #329