Apr 19, 2022Please stop saying feedback is a giftStop pretending that you like everything about feedback. A gift is something that is meant to be liked. Feedback is not. I once gave feedback in a direct message (always default to 1–1 DMs when giving constructive criticism) to a leader at a company whom I thought was acting in…Feedback3 min readFeedback3 min read
Published inre-engineering·Apr 10, 2022Be the person everybody wants to teachI’ve consciously taken a new approach to learning to do my job, and it’s by doing one simple thing very deliberately: to always teach what I learn. Suppose I’m an oldie (in terms of tenure) in a team of new joiners. It’s certain that everyone will want or need to…Learning And Development3 min readLearning And Development3 min read
Published inre-engineering·Mar 16, 2022Thoughts on ObservabilityI haven’t thought deeply about observability as a concept until recently. Before this, I had practiced making the systems I work on more observable by adding logging in application code and setting up some dashboards that monitor network traffic and memory usage. …Distributed Systems3 min readDistributed Systems3 min read
Published inre-engineering·Mar 15, 2022Conscious of debugging approachesWhen I’m stuck, I like to fall back to old ways and just do things that I remember worked for me, even when the situation then and now are quite different. For example, I was trying to start an Android emulator for a React Native app on my MacBook and…Debugging2 min readDebugging2 min read
Mar 14, 2022Don’t reply when you’re not readyEveryone on your team works remotely. Someone just asked you a question in a Slack DM and you’re in the middle of something. What do you do? My answer: wait till I’m free to sit down and read the question carefully before writing a reply. Right? Isn’t that what you…Communication2 min readCommunication2 min read
Mar 10, 2022Don’t use Rails console sandbox in productionYou can use rails console to gain full access to models and controllers and helpers provided by Rails in an interactive ruby (irb) session. This is fantastic as it provides us with the ability to quickly do some tests, like creating an instance of User and an instance of a…Ruby2 min readRuby2 min read
Published inre-engineering·Mar 3, 2022You are not self madeThere is no such thing as a self-taught or self-made programmer, because… Someone learned before you and wrote the curriculum that you are basing your learning on. Before that, someone made the computer you’re learning to code on. Before that, someone mined the materials, which was processed by various someones…Commerce2 min readCommerce2 min read
Published inre-engineering·Mar 1, 2022Don’t ship code in your first 30–60 daysI’ve experienced some internal tension (in my head) in my third and fourth week at my new job at Shopify. …New Job3 min readNew Job3 min read
Published inre-engineering·Feb 28, 2022Not paid to read youWhen in school we can write whatever we want and we will still be guaranteed and audience of at least one person, because our teachers are paid to read our writing. Once we graduate, that guarantee is gone forever. Even if you paid (like we do with ads) you are…Writing Tips2 min readWriting Tips2 min read
Published inre-engineering·Feb 23, 2022idempotencyIdempotent is a word used to describe a system component that has the characteristic of “having the same outcome regardless of repeated action.” That’s my definition anyway. Officially, from googling, it is: Idempotence is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple…Idempotency3 min readIdempotency3 min read
