A collection of longer, more in-depth posts representing some of my better writing
Mental Wellness
We’re all very tired. 2020 has so far been a living rendition of the supposed Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times”. Given all the major events that have occurred thus far, it’s actually hard to remember all that’s happened since the…
Life After COVID-19
The drumbeat of unprecedented events come at a daily clip. Disney resorts, for the first time, shut down indefinitely. The stock market, with some of the biggest index drops ever and a place in macroeconomic history books. The highest number of…
Functioning Through a Pandemic
As of the first draft of this post, it’s been 6 days since my company transitioned most of its workforce into work-from-home arrangements, which was coincidentally the same day that the NBA suspended its entire season as one of its players…
The Engineering Leaders Hired by Startups
It started with a tweet: Agreed, particularly in looking for an external hire, it’s to compliment a missing piece within the current team and more often than not it’s the management piece. — Allen Cheung (@allenmhc) January 23, 2020 If you read…
Year in Review — 2019
2019 marks the end of the second decade in the 21st century. I’m going to resist the temptation to do the thing where you look back at the past 10 years and try to sum up 3652.5 individual days into a couple of pithy words to commemorate the…
Unpacking Conway’s Law
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about organizational structure and design. Eventually, I’m reminded and inevitably return to Conway’s Law: Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose…
Parenthood :: Management
Does becoming a parent make for a better manager? I remember vividly when I first brought it up as a possibility. I was interviewing at a few companies after deciding to end my time at Square, and wanted to continue my career as an engineering…
Evolving Real-Time Strategy Gaming with DotA Underlords
Mods are unique to PC gaming. Unlike their mobile and console counterparts, the open nature of the PC allows for amateur game designers and programmers to take an existing game engine—sometimes along with the art assets—and build something that is…
Interviewing for Signals
I’ve been helping out with interviews for my employers since my first gig out of college, some 15 years ago. In that timeframe, the process to get a job as a software engineer hasn’t changed too drastically; there’s still a…
Year in Review — 2018
Do you remember, as an adult, when you stopped making a big deal out of your own birthday? For me, it was probably when it was no longer cool to get presents or throw parties that would highlight a birthday, when the raw age itself became less…