Posts by Allen Cheung
Google Photos has Won
A year ago, I was trying to use a handful of services manage my private photos collection. Each service had its plusses and minuses, but since most were cheap and/or free, the right strategy was to redundantly use all…
The Greener Grass on the Management Side
In modern tech companies, there’s a dual career ladder structure for software engineers: they can either progress more technologically (as senior and lead engineers) or advance on the management side (as engineering managers and directors). The best companies ensure…
How Culture Matters
I really like this quote from Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein, courtesy of this article from Stratechery contrasting cultures from familiar tech companies: If one wishes to distinguish leadership from management or administration, one can argue that leadership…
No Shortcuts to Software Development Experience
Software startups, once their engineering organizations reach a certain size, put together a career ladder for their engineers. It usually comes at a point where there’s enough diversity in abilities that a distinction is useful, for straight-forward things…
Passive Loot Games
I’ve been checking out Tom Clancy’s The Division for the past week or two[1]. It’s a third-person shooter, set in a post-virus-infected Manhattan, where the primary conflict is sleeper government agents versus extremely…
Effective Communication Requires Traffic Engineering
Solving communication with clever tooling is akin to buying into a get-rich-quick scheme. I’d like to think most of us recognize that good communication in itself is hard , but I do think a lot of us want…
