I feel extremely fortunate to have had great mentors throughout my career. As I find myself in a position to mentor others, I constantly wonder what made my mentors great so I could learn to be a better mentor. Looking back it is interesting that my mentors have been from…

There is plenty of advice to help managers figure out what they should be doing in their first few days at a new company (entire books have been written on this topic) but not a whole lot for engineers. I am going to try to share some of the things…

When starting my career, I didn’t have a lot of clarity on what I should be optimizing for and I wish I had more information at that time. This article is my attempt to capture some of the things I wish I knew at that time. …

This article is inspired by Keavy McMinn’s Who I Want to Work For where she lists the characteristics that make someone an ideal leader for her. I think it’s a great exercise to identify and capture what’s important to you. Without further ado, here’s what I look for in a…

I have been a software engineer for close to 8 years and this feels like a good time to capture some of the things I have learnt along the way. I am framing this as advice to my younger self but it is highly likely that my younger self would…

I get this question a lot — from candidates in interviews, from folks I mentor and from budding new engineers. So I am writing this down so I can refer back to this when I need to. My perspective is heavily shaped by my own personal experiences of working at…

I have a lot of friends who are keen to get more people into tech but don’t have information about all the amazing organizations that offer such opportunities. Thanks to the location, there are a lot of opportunities to help people get into tech in the Bay Area. So I…

As a software engineer, I have found the following principles useful when building new products. Note that these may not necessarily apply to scaling/making changes to existing products. 1. Be lazy Try to avoid solving problems of the future. If you hear a stakeholder say “This will not work when…