Jun 25Book Summary: the Staff Engineer’s PathThis is an extreme brief summary based on my takeaway for Tanya Reilly’s The Staff Engineer’s Path. My mental model of the book is summarized in the following graph: Change in Expectation You can’t avoid being a leader: if you feel like “someone needs to do something” in a room, that “someone” quite…Staff Engineer2 min readStaff Engineer2 min read
May 5Practice a language with ChatGPTSince I am learning Spanish, but my level is too bad to have a meaningful natural conversation with anyone who is fluent with Spanish, and it’s too costly and inconvenient to find a tutor. I found it interesting practicing with ChatGPT, so I spent some time to quickly put together this toy app which allows you to practice the language you selected in a dialog with your AI powered language tutor. Try it out: https://ai-language-tutor.streamlit.app/ChatGPT1 min readChatGPT1 min read
Jan 12My 2022 Reading ListAs last year, rated by how much I enjoyed the reading experience, which can be really personal depending on many things such as my expectation, my contexts and personal preferences. Ordered by the time I started reading: The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology…Books2 min readBooks2 min read
Dec 18, 2022Staff+ Engineer Career Growth — QCon Plus TakeawaysI attended the QCon Plus recently and here’s my takeaway for its Staff+ Engineer Panel, sharing in case it’s helpful to anyone. First of all, to be able to go one step further than advising “staff engineers should find their own path”, we need a framework to make the problem…Career Development4 min readCareer Development4 min read
Aug 13, 2022Book Summary: The Art of ActionDrawing is my new favourite to clarify understanding, structure the knowledge, and visualize the logics which helps memorize and share. Here’s a new book I read: The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results: And here is my exercise for a navigation map through…Management1 min readManagement1 min read
Jul 17, 2022Too busy to …“This is important, but just too busy to do it” — we probably say this to ourselves a lot (well, I do at least). How shall we interpret this message? To answer it, let’s visit some fundamentals on operation management. Little’s Law It’s a theorem in queueing theory, which roughly says: flow…Time Management3 min readTime Management3 min read
Jun 2, 2022What’s on your plate?Recently I’ve been asked to help people sort out what’s on their plate. It was not the first time, moreover, I’ve done task prioritisation quite many times. But now I suddenly realise that I’ve always been relying on the intuition to improvise, which is unreliable. …Prioritization3 min readPrioritization3 min read
Dec 31, 2021My 2021 Reading ListLiterally the last day of this stolen year, about the time to note down the books that I have read in this year to keep track of where the time has been. Rated by how much I enjoyed reading them, which can be really personal depending on many things such…Book Review2 min readBook Review2 min read
Dec 15, 2021Manager’s teamworkThis article is about manager’s teamwork, not manager’s work (where a big part is to promote teamwork) — it’s about you, the manager, not your reports. The first team concept I wouldn’t doubt in any healthy organisations, people would emphasise and recognise teamwork a lot for ICs. It’s a well articulated responsibility, something that…Management4 min readManagement4 min read
Oct 22, 2021How to compare job offersWhen compare job offers, there are many considerations that people normally talk about: growing market, better growth opportunity, happiness and so on. But how do you compare obscure questions like growth opportunity between two entirely different companies, say one is a startup, the other is a Fortune 500? …Job Offer4 min readJob Offer4 min read
