These 2 things are often confused in our industry: experience and institutional knowledge. Too often I see companies evaluating engineers based on the fact they know where to go and make changes quickly and put out fires, rather than looking at the impact long term an individual has, on the platform, on its stability, on […]
Posts Tagged: software engineering
Engineering Marketing
First of all please notice the title of this post: Engineering Marketing — and not Marketing Engineering! (I do work currently in Ads Engineering in Netflix, which deals as you would expect with Marketing Engineering, in other words engineering solutions to support our digital marketing efforts.) Point being that this post is about marketing engineering […]
Java, Map and Optional
I do like the Optional class in Java — it is a long awaited elegant replacement for returning null whenever something isn’t there then relying on if( x != null ) checks or using ?: in the format (x == null) ? “foo” : “bar”. It works great also with the new Java stream classes […]
Thoughts on Programming and Its Challenges
At the end of another tough week in Netflix I look back at what I have achieved and what has been challenging in achieving it. I do wonder what I do looks like from the outside and I can’t really see how someone would make sense of my job. I sit in front of 3 (sometimes more!) […]
Start Your Own Open Source Project using SourceForge
It’s interesting what one can find when cleaning up an old laptop before dumping it 🙂 Old photos that I’ve long forgotten of (some embarrassing ones too, omg the haircuts I supported throughout the time! :D), snippets of code back from the day when technology X was just coming out of its stables and I […]
Coding — My Daily Dose of Dopamine
I was asked recently by a friend of mine about what does my “standard” day of work consist of at Netflix. I had to explain to him that it’s hard to talk about a “standard” day as each day sees me looking at different pieces of our infrastructure and requires different challenges to be solved. […]
About Writing Clean Code
Every now and then I feel any developer should sit down and reflect upon some of the experiences from the past. I feel this is healthy: once you allow enough time to pass, you can go back and revisit good and bad (technical and less technical) experiences from the past and learn from them. The […]
Of Engineers and Creating Things
I had a chat recently with someone about engineers, and it is because of that chat I feel I need to write this, because the person I was talking to made some interesting points about engineers (mainly in Silicon Valley, due to their geographical position at the moment, but this I’m sure it’s often the […]
Careful with Naming in Your Platform — Part 2
I’ve written before on this blog about the importance of naming “things” in a tech platform/framework and I feel this deserves a bit more attention, so here is a follow-up. Previous post saw me discussing naming class member data as well as database fields — these can wreak havoc amongst your users (be them developers […]
Careful with Naming in Your Platform
For those of you who keep an eye on my blog, I write quite a bit about technology and about software engineering — that’s because by trade I am a software engineer and quite passionate about a few areas in this segment. I write code and as such I blog a lot about coding. I […]