I have interviewed many people (both engineers and managers) lately, and one of the standard questions I ask is how to build high-quality software. Of course, I provide more context and explanations, but the gist is the same. I heard all kinds of answers. However, I was puzzled that almost…

Each day at work, I make tons and tons of small and big decisions about code, team, projects, and so on. It’s incredible how many of them are based on about a dozen core principles. I settled down on them over a long time and a lot of (painful) experiences…

I write about the software industry in general, management, and software development. I mostly try to shed light on how everything works. Once in a while, I veer off into philosophical subjects but bear with me, I will come back to tech. Here is the list of my articles that…

Let me start from events of 30 years ago and 6000 miles from where I live now. I grew up in the late USSR and early Ukraine. Both of these places/times were quite turbulent. Street violence was extremely common and touched, one way or another, pretty much everybody back then. …

Decades ago, when I was a student, I had several friends who always were brewing some crazy ideas. And the problem wasn’t exactly that ideas were crazy. Sometimes (rarely), people with crazy ideas become the next billionaires. …

Each manager needs to figure out how to assess people's performance on their team. Over the years, I have seen various methods put in place in different companies. And I ended up frustrated with most of them (specifically more formal ones). …

I just watched a talk by Ian Cooper: TDD, Where did all go wrong? The short summary: Unit tests (produced in TDD style) too often concentrate on testing classes. They should be targeting module public interfaces/behavior of your software. Taking into account that you target implementation details (read: some internal…

I went through two similar acquisitions. One was when SpydrSafe was acquired by Okta. and another time was when New Edge Labs was acquired by Netskope. Both Okta and Netskope are classical enterprise B2B businesses that decided to buy (vs. build). It was an incredibly interesting experience to go through…

Have you ever looked at somebody's code and immediately rolled your eyes and thought: “Oh… This is structured all wrong. Another approach would be simpler and more extensible. Why in the world they haven’t thought about this case? Who the hell named it like that?” And so on… I am…