Tech debt is only debt if you have any intention of paying it off. However, how we address legacy code can reveal growth paths for our engineers.

Writing robust failover behaviors is usually the right move for many websites. This week, I found a case in which it actually caused an outage rather than save us from one.

Over the last year, I had to grow myself in order to serve my team. This meant focusing more on business goals and aligning team expectations than I expected. Here is a short bit that rationalizes that change.

If you’re a software developer and set your mind on one goal, this should be it.

I “know” a lot of programming languages. I’m proficient in some of them, highly competent in a few others, and have a baseline competency in many. Here are some of my tricks to rapidly learning a new programming language.

The company that I work with is moving to a “shift left” method of test assurance. I believe that we have positioned our test engineers poorly and need to set new expectations to create better products in the future.

I just went through a round of promotions with my company. I have some opinions on what that means and how well we executed, but I was struck by how legalistic the process is. I acknowledge the need for measurable standards, but I feel that managers should evaluate less in terms of someone’s ability and more into an individual’s behaviors.

I was listening to a podcast that seemed to consider the process of learning as an evaluation of costs and rewards. I don’t like to think of learning in this way, but I took a bigger issue with the risk analysis comparing the pros and cons of diving deep in a specific stack or learning more generally.

I have a lot of conversations with my team about the choices that we make and challenge them to be thoughtful about them.

Earlier this week, I was explaining the importance of the dSYM folder and why we had to upload it with our binary to one of my reports. I realized that the whole notion of symbolication was foreign to her because we’ve abstracted everything away and she never had to deal with any of it. I put together something to share with my team on what symbolication is, why it’s important, and the need for the dSYM folder (and similar symbolication artifacts for other platforms).