Published inThe Atomic Engineer·14 hours agoMember-onlyHow I released a feature to 200M users…without any errors 🤯 — I turned on a new service that went from 0 ➡️ 350 req/sec immediately. With zero errors. “Something must be wrong…” 😅 Working right the first time is uncommon at best, and often means I missed something. But it really happened! Here’s the story. Medium gets about 8,000 req/sec to…Programming3 min readProgramming3 min read
Published inThe Atomic Engineer·4 days agoMember-onlyThat time I redid the same work six timesA lesson on the evils of duplication and how not to build the next unicorn — Long before the glory days of OpenAI, I was part of the founding team of an ambitious natural-language processing project. The plan was to collect billions of online customer reviews, run them through an in-house aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) engine, and provide AI-summarized insights to anyone who would pay us…Programming10 min readProgramming10 min read
Published inThe Atomic Engineer·Mar 15, 2024Member-onlyWill AI replace software engineers?On Tuesday (March 12, 2024), Cognition Labs announced Devin, their AI software engineer. Read the full announcement here → The software eng world blew up immediately. Common sentiments included: We’ll all be out of jobs soon! This is terrible! We’ll all be out of jobs soon! Finally! This changes nothing.Programming4 min readProgramming4 min read
Published inThe Atomic Engineer·Mar 8, 2024Member-onlyNobody wants to work with our best engineerKindness is underrated. — There was a wizard engineer (we’ll call him “Jon”) who worked for me a few years ago. His code was good. His PRs were quick. By all technical accounts, he was a great engineer. We got some common feedback about him from other engineers: “Jon is one of the best…Software Development2 min readSoftware Development2 min read
Published inThe Atomic Engineer·Mar 2, 2024Write for The Atomic EngineerReach an established audience of software engineers and tech professionals — Welcome to The Atomic Engineer ⚛️ 🧑💻 Do you have an idea to share with other engineers? Submit your draft to this form. We’ll get back to you quickly (usually within a day). Submission rules Before submitting your article, there are a few essential things you need to know. By submitting an…2 min read2 min read
Published inThe Atomic Engineer·Mar 1, 2024Member-onlyGet unstuck, then get promotedI got this message from a friend last week. Getting stuck at a level is painful, and it only gets more painful the longer it goes on. Ideally, you’ll break out of it at your current company (and maybe even your current team), avoiding the (un)noble tradition of job-hopping-to-level-up. My…Programming4 min readProgramming4 min read
Published inThe Atomic Engineer·Feb 16, 2024My magical first job as a self-taught software engineerI’m a self-taught software engineer. No formal courses. No internship. Being self-taught means I have some noticeable gaps in my technical knowledge. But that never stopped me, much to the chagrin of my coworkers. I found my first job by searching “web development” on Indeed. I sent my nearly-empty CV…Programming2 min readProgramming2 min read
Published inThe Atomic Engineer·Feb 14, 2024Member-onlyAn algorithm for high-performance engineering teamsHow does a team go from “good” to “great”? — Great teams don’t start great. They become great through focused effort. The 2004 NBA finals showed the value of a team over individuals. The Los Angeles Lakers played like five superstar individual contributors while the Detroit Pistons played like a team. Against 8-to-1 odds, the Pistons won and showed the…Leadership7 min readLeadership7 min read
Published inThe Atomic Engineer·Feb 9, 2024I almost got fired onceMy friend, and manager at the time, James Russell, pulled me into a room one morning. He told me I wouldn’t be working on the ML product I’d been building. It would be transitioned to another product engineer and data scientist. I asked, with clear concern in my voice, if…Programming4 min readProgramming4 min read
Published inThe Atomic Engineer·Feb 2, 2024Member-onlyA tale of two engineering teams👋 Hi, this is Jacob with this week’s newsletter. I write about software engineering, big tech/startups, and career growth. This week, I’m sharing personal experiences from two very different engineering teams I was part of. If you’ve had similar experiences, I’d love to hear about them. Thank you for reading! …Programming3 min readProgramming3 min read