September 3, 2019

Why We Code Review

Code review can be an important part of a team’s culture, so it is worth thinking about. If you asked me about code review two years ago, I would’ve said its key to maintaining code quality and mentoring less experienced programmers. Now I know better. Code review is much about making the code better as it is about making the team happier. How the team runs code reviews should be based on the team’s values and culture.

August 22, 2019

Interview Questions

Good technical interview questions are hard to find. In the last month, I’ve seen some really great ones and equally bad ones. I want to go through some of them and write down my highly biased 5-star rating on their effectiveness.

First, for some context on how I evaluate interview questions. Your interview questions should be:

Respectful of the candidates
Objective and evaluated consistently
Gathers relevant and insightful data

When it comes to data gathering, I’ve seen teams make two kinds of mistakes. The first mistake is coverage: The entire interview panel asks the same type of questions, with little coordination. The second mistake is that the interviewer interprets the results subjectively; They don’t have an objective and consistent way of evaluating answers and often rely on intuition to make a decision.

August 19, 2019

Own Your Data

I previously wrote about owning my own data. An important part of data ownership is backing up your data. I use S3 as my long term data store. It is pretty easy to set this up using Terraform.

S3

Provisioning a S3 bucket is simply a single Terraform resource:

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "repo_archive_log" {
  acl = "log-delivery-write"
  bucket = "example-bucket"
  tags = {
    Name = "example"
    TTL = "persistent"
    ManagedBy = "Terraform"
  }
}

August 11, 2019

Another year, another blog

A little more than a year ago, I moved my blog from Blogger to Medium. Medium, as a blogging platform, was always meant to be temporary. It is platform with a modern look. It is a free service. One does not need to worry about domain registration, uptime, security patches(!), or a host of little things that adds up. The price is, however, to give up control of your content.

Control is a high price. I will turn forty-one this year and memories seem strikingly precious. Control, for me, isn’t simply about monetization - I care little about that. Nor do I care much about appearance and layout. I just need occassional code snippets and images. Control means agency over how my writings are backed up and programmatically processing my contents.