Making Smaller Circles explores technical leadership, management and strategies that contribute to building great software.
As you grow as a Senior Engineer and beyond, the leadership side of your work becomes more prominent and, in some cases, eclipses the technical side. Designing a scalable system may not seem as hard as getting buy-in from key…
Read More Top non-technical skills for Senior Engineers and Technical Leaders
I recently hired a new Engineering Manager to take over one of my teams. During the hiring process we received almost 200 applications. The overall quality of candidates looked good on paper; some were already at companies like Amazon, Twilio, Uber.…
Read More Avoid these Interview Mistakes for your next Engineering Manager Role
Stephen Covey's 7 Habits for Highly Effective People is a business book classic. What if we took the idea of 7 Effective Habits and applied it to Software Engineers? Here's my list based on common habits I have seen amongst…
For software engineers, constant learning comes with the territory. Learning is at the center of what we do, whether it's keeping up with new tech, or learning the architecture and codebase of a project you just inherited. Here are some…
People getting started with web application development do so with the hopes of breaking into tech. Unfortunately, I often see many get on the wrong track and end up frustrated and dejected. There are a ton of tutorials and materials…
Read More 5 Mistakes Beginners Make When Learning Web Development
A great product tends to sell itself. It's the obvious choice for the problem it solves, and it solve that problem very well. Such a product appears to have a natural pull. So how can you go about creating a…
Read More Demand-side Thinking: Creating Pull For Your Products
Prototyping is probably the most effective way to discover great new product ideas, and technical solutions to challenging problems. Building a simple demo lets you explore your ideas outside your own mind. It allows you to find new possibilities and…
From the book Scale: As is often the case when moving into uncharted territory and trying to develop new ideas and ways of looking at a problem, the final product seems so obvious once the discovery or breakthrough has been…
Some of the most interesting projects I worked on at LinkedIn involved building large scale real-time pricing and machine learning products. They required crafting fault-tolerant distributed data architectures to support model training, forecasting and dynamic control systems. None of this…
This guide will walk you through, step-by-step, on how to build a web app. If you have been teaching yourself programming, you will have picked up different skills without learning how to put them together in an end-to-end project to…
