Random advice I find myself repeating a lot… “Those who should decide on the architecture are those that will be on call for it” Software architecture is fun. So much so that there’s never any shortage of smart people eager to jump in with their opinions. In my various engineering leadership roles throughout my career so far I have received many unsolicited architecture diagrams from ambitious…

For varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond. — How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running it How to write a design doc, take feedback, and drive it to resolution, in a reasonable period of time How to mentor an early-career teammate…

And why you should — You’ll never guess how I got started. Nineties kids—do you remember these?

Learn to identify them, make habits to avoid them — Let me make one thing clear first. If you are a beginner programmer, this article is not meant to make you feel bad about the mistakes that you might be making but rather to make you aware of them, teach you to spot signs of them, and remind you to…

A laundry list of personal reminders — On the Development Process Code isn’t just meant to be executed. Code is also a means of communication across a team, a way to describe to others the solution to a problem. Readable code is not a nice-to-have, it is a fundamental part of what writing code is about. This involves factoring code clearly…

By: John Blair, Netflix Partner Engineering The Netflix application runs on hundreds of smart TVs, streaming sticks and pay TV set top boxes. The role of a Partner Engineer at Netflix is to help device manufacturers launch the Netflix application on their devices. In this article we talk about one…

Disclaimer and proviso: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t represent Amazon’s position in any way whatsoever”. Have you ever failed a code-intensive technical interview? I have, and can 100% relate. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my professional career. It happened once, because…

Learn how to import packages and modules (and the difference between the two) — By the end of the tutorial, this is the directory structure (for the Medium_Imports_Tutorial project) that you would be comfortable working with — in terms of importing any script(s) from one subdirectory into another (arrows in blue). Note: If you’d like to play along, here is the Github repo. Before…

This is the fourth part of my React tutorials. See the Intro to react.js here There are four different options to style React components. All depend on your personal preferences and the specific complexity of your application. If you want to add just a few style properties, then inline styling…

A way to understand software architecture and its failures — There are a couple of “standard spiels” I have been giving my engineers for decades at this point. It’s about time I wrote them down and made them more widely accessible. This is the first of them! Several years ago, I was in an…

This post is a preview of my upcoming book on GraphQL schema design, it provides an introduction to GraphQL by starting back in time to understand what problems GraphQL is really trying to solve, and why it was designed this way. …

The Internet provides a wealth of material on code reviews: on the effect of code reviews on company culture, on formal security reviews, shorter guides, longer checklists, humanized reviews, reasons for doing code reviews in the first place, best practices, more best practices, statistics on code review effectiveness for catching…

As Airbnb builds more of its Frontend around Server Side Rendering, we took a look at how to optimize our server configurations to support it. — At Airbnb, we have spent years steadily migrating all Frontend code to a consistent architecture where entire web pages are written as a hierarchy of React components hydrated with data from our API. The role Ruby on Rails plays in getting the web to the browser is reduced every day…

It seems arbitrary the way engineers are given their titles. From the moment you start in the field you long for that glorious Senior title. Most engineers, at least those with no management or founding ambitions, view it as the pinnacle of success. But how do you get it? If…

…that I wish I had known when I started grad school — Three years ago I was working in a neuroscience lab in Barcelona, busy putting electrodes on people and teaching classes on cognitive systems. Today I design and write software for a living. Of course back in science I wrote a lot of software — if you want to make any…

This article outlines four different strategies for organizing code: by component, by toolbox, by layer, and by kind. I think these four form a kind of hierarchy with regards to which kind of cohesion they favor and in my experience they cover most of the real-world code I’ve worked with…

And what you can do to get to the next level — Being a junior, mid-level, or senior developer doesn’t solely have to do with the years of programming experience that you have. A junior developer can even be older than a senior developer. It all comes down to skill. This doesn’t mean that a senior developer has to be an expert…

As I focus on becoming a better manager of engineers, I have been reflecting more and more on the advice that produced a 10X boost in my abilities at that same stage. …

Since leaving SocialChorus I have been doing an odd combination of management consulting and on the ground software design consulting. I have been doing what I am good at, fixing organizations. Almost always a desperate request comes to me focused on code. There are no tests, or test are unreliable…