This post is for anyone who is wondering what might be a good approach to writing tests during a software engineering live coding interview. Companies assess different things during the live coding stage of an interview process. Some will want you to have an efficient algorithm, others will want you…

Quicksort – stylised as a single word for some reason unknown to me – is a practical sorting algorithm that is often used in production code because it is very efficient for a sorting algorithm. To give you an idea of how complicated this is, I spent about 45 minutes reading the Quicksort chapter in…

(This is #8 of 30 raw essays in 30 days. It’s a poem.) Short time Short story But there lacks quality Long time History We made mere quantity Until our strokes are facile Our jerks shall prove us futile And beyond reach, Divinity

(This is #7 of 30 raw essays in 30 days.) It’s 6 am and the alarm goes off. Not the riiiiiiing on the iPhone designed to yank you back from dreamland (what a terrible list of built-in alarm sounds), but the subtle sound of crickets getting gradually chirping louder. Chi chi chi… CHI CHI CHI CHI… I…

(This is #6 of 30 raw essays in 30 days.) Is this fictional or autobiographical, you wonder? I ask in response: does it matter? I used to be able to think on my feet, which is to say, when I find myself in a situation where my mind is quietly posing a question, I would be able to quietly answer it…

(This is #5 of 30 raw essays in 30 days.) He had failed to play in the NFL, missing the qualifiers by one position. The muscles and smouldering hot looks would have helped his team rake in more money, probably, but they passed on him. Years passed and he had found a new thing to do. He’d raise his…

(This is #4 of 30 raw essays in 30 days. The topic is my own. #3 was published on my newsletter as a paid subscriber only post and won’t be found on this site.) I would like myself to disappear and write about life in a way that is about the tiniest kernels of truth that exist in every moment of…

(This is #3 of 30 raw essays in 30 days. The topic is my own.) This was published exclusively to paying subscribers of my Substack, which you can find here.

(This is #2 of 30 raw essays in 30 days. The topic was submitted by D.) How do you feel about the intersection of parenthood and work?  Let’s start zoomed-out. Despite the differences in where and how we were raised, our lives from birth almost invariably go down the same path, perhaps with one or…

(This is #1 of 30 raw essays in 30 days. The topic was submitted by someone.) Why do some of us wonder if becoming a parent (newly minted or an old timer) is compatible with having a new job? Because it’s challenging! The main challenge is to juggle learning to be a parent of a new child (or being a…

This is one of those public service announcement posts that really needs to be searchable on the internet because bureaucracy is piece of work. This post is most likely relevant to you if: You are a foreigner based in Germany, you have applied for a residence permit for your child who was born in…

This is Part 1 of a two-, maybe three-, part series on how we almost decided not to have kids and become parents. We could explore the world, cultures, art, business, and so on—things we are happily doing in Berlin now. I imagine we could find enough ‘unknowns’ in this world to explore till we draw…

These days there is not a thing that I’m more grateful for than my wife. I have much to say about her, about how much she has influenced who I am today, which I fully expect to write about in this newsletter over time. In this post I want to examine something that I’ve been thinking about a lot…

Yep, I thought I was going to do something big with my life as Elon Musk has. It was when I believed that doing “something big” was the epitome of a meaningful life. The internet reproducing a meme that Elon Musk’s job is to be badass. (source: The Joe Rogan Experience podcast) Nowadays, having…

The older I’ve become, the more I’ve started to make decisions based on convenience. Based on a hunch and a recent experience, I think it may be time to reconsider that as my default approach. The other day, our 8 m/o daughter, Charlotte, found our poodle Brownie’s water bowl. She crawled with…

In my line of work (software engineering), one does not simply ignore the keyboard. It is, after all, the tool we interact with the most to get our job done. So I thought it was natural that shortly after I started my first job as a software engineer in 2016 I became acquainted with and found myself…

Stop pretending that you like everything about feedback. A gift is something that is meant to be liked. Feedback is not. Photo by Mark König 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…

I’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. Not a work setting, but that’s me teaching students about a possible career in tech Suppose I’m an oldie (in terms of tenure) in a team of new joiners…

At the time of writing, I’m running this blog on Gatsby.js. It’s open sourced and you can view the code on GitHub Running the blog on Gatsby means I have free reign on how I want the site to work. Everything can be tweaked if you decide to invest time to read the documentation and apply your React…

There’s a party question that some people ask, which goes, “If you could have a superpower, what would you like it to be?” In the last few years I’ve refined my answer as this: “I would like to be able to slip out of any social situation without repercussions.” Ha ha. It usually gets a few knowing…