A collection of longer, more in-depth posts representing some of my better writing
Asian-American Cinema
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 already won a long list of awards…
A Weighted Job Opportunities Matrix
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, as their…
Year in Review — 2022
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…
Asking an AI the Right Questions
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 until its API was made generally available…
The Kinesis Advantage360
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…
Should Engineering Management Stay Technical?
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…
The Startup Flywheel
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 time:…
Textbook Answers
One of the first interview questions I learned to give, as a new grad engineer a couple months out of college, was asking candidates how to detect a cycle in a linked list. I was taught that the “right solution” was essentially…
Where Engineers End Up
Often, I end up relating my own experiences in industry to other software engineers and managers to help them in their careers. At times, it’s someone on the same team at work, one of my direct or skip-level reports. I also tend to segue…
Year in Review — 2021
It’s close to the end of another year, which makes for a good excuse to take stock of these last 12 months, take a deep breath, before charging forward into 2022. Unfortunately, COVID-19 is still very much a part of our lives and some ways…