Posts by Allen Cheung
How Many People Do You Manage?
If you’ve been in any sort of management position, you can relate to having to answer this question, time and again. Recruiters; hiring managers; even fellow people managers—it's one of the easiest heuristics to quantify scope…
The Personalities that Make Software Development Suck
Spend any time building software in a professional setting, and there will be patterns that you can see develop, across teams and companies and domains that span reach of software and automation. There are, of course, the office-dwelling archetypes…
Review: The Expanse Series
The Expanse is a sci-fi series, that started out—and is continuing—as a series of novels but whose story has also been adapted to a television series of the same name. On the literary front, the books are…
Piles of Past Work Notes
Lists of accomplishments at work are a useful exercise, both for performance reviews in the moment, but also for posterity[1] years after the fact. Through a variety of employers, roles, and even note-taking apps, I’ve compiled a…
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…
Review: Brief Answers to the Big Questions
In my high school, the hard sciences were taught by grade: 10th grade Biology, 11th grade Chemistry, and 12th grade Physics. I was most drawn to physics, both in its proximity to mathematics but also in its expansive theories that…
