This is a set of posts that I’d like to highlight, generally longer and more in-depth thoughts that hopefully make for interesting reading.
in|retrospect Articles.

This presentation resonates: Being Glue It’s a pretty long read, but the high-level gist is that software engineers are, more often than not, evaluated primarily on hard technical chops. You know: the typical stuff that you find in technical interviews, …

A year ago, I ordered and reviewed the Kinesis Advantage360: a modern update to the Advantage line of ergonomic keyboards. As I noted with that review though, custom keyboards have come a long way in the past few years, and …

As a first-generation Asian-American immigrant, the duality of Eastern and Western culture is a part of everyday life. There are holidays and traditions on both sides that we end up celebrating; home-cooked meals that cater to multiple styles of cooking; …

This article caught my attention: Being “rockstars”: when software was a talents/creatives industry 🎠The post meanders quite a bit, but the central theme is that the author laments the loss of creativity in software development. Their solution, then, is …

A couple of months back, we turned on the Oscar awards, I think for the first time in well over a decade, mostly to see how Everything Everywhere All at Once would fare that evening. Given that the movie had …

It’s 2023, but the layoffs in tech continue unabated from last year, impacting some of the biggest companies in our industry. Fortunately, reports suggest that workers are able to find new jobs within a couple of months of a layoff, …

Compared to the year-long economic celebration of cheap capital in 2021, the contrast to 2022 is stark: raising interest rates, high inflation, a battered stock market, mass layoffs—and this is with a strong US economy with persistently low unemployment rates. …

It feels like 2022 is the year of democratizing AI. GPT-3 made headlines back in 2020 when it launched to a limited audience and its new users played around with the tool, but it took a little over a year …

It took about 10 months, but Drop and Kinesis finally shipped their new Kinesis Advantage360 Professional keyboard over late September. Coincidentally, at about the same time, I started messing around with mechanical keyboards and had just built a GMMK Pro …

In engineering management circles, a common question that gets asked—in podcasts, in job interviews, and sometimes in peer coaching sessions—is whether managers should stay technically proficient, and if so, how and how much. The subtext here is that as people …

The PayPal Mafia is stuff of legend around Silicon Valley—at least, for the first 2 decades of the 21st century. Counted in this group of early employees are a number of entrepreneurs and investors for some major companies during that …