Posts
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Why did you become an EM?
When you start out in tech, you see people in all these different roles, but you don’t really see how people move throughout them. So since transitioning into engineering management about six months ago, I’ve had a few people reach out to me curious about how someone moves across the mysterious line into “management”.
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What's the longest word you can make in Scrabble by adding one letter at a time?
I’ve been playing a lot of Scrabble over dinner lately. A common way to add points is to add a word perpendicular to an existing word, extending it:
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Time
Time is your biggest asset as a software engineer; here’s my favorite framing of it.
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The moving middle
There’s a lot of talk about how the pandemic will end Silicon Valley as we know it: everyone will realize they can flee to a better place with a lower cost of living now that everyone’s seen the wonders of remote work.
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The surprising effectiveness of manager-cron
One of the most effective productivity hacks I’ve learned recently is what I call “manager-cron” or “1-1 cron”. It’s very simple: at the top of my weekly 1-1 Google doc is a section that looks like this:
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The little voice
There have been a few times in my career when I’ve consciously said that things were going well, but that I had a little voice in the back of my head telling me something I was subconsciously trying to ignore. Fortunately for me these have been, in the grand scheme of things, pretty benign – mostly thoughts that I was working on the wrong thing, not that something more sinister was wrong – but time is all you have, and it’s better to spend it working on the right things.
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What I miss about working at Google
After working at Google for four years after college, I’ve now been at Plaid for a bit under a year. People often ask - how does it compare?
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Vim spell checking
I’ve been writing posts for this site using Vim to write Markdown files. It mostly works great, but I wanted to enable some 21st century features like spell checking. Turns out, it’s pretty easy.
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What can I do?
It’s clear by now that America’s original (and ongoing) sin is the way we treat black people. It’s also clear that as a white guy it’s not enough to quietly not be racist; I have to actively work to oppose it. What I’m working through right now is how.
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"We Don't Negotiate" is a lie
When a famous Silicon Valley tech company claims it doesn’t negotiate, it’s a lie. This has been well-covered on the internet, but I wanted to relay a specific experience I had with this claim and show a couple ways you can work around it.
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Beating Animal Crossing
Like every good millenial I took up playing Animal Crossing as Bad Times 2020 began.
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First post
Trying out a new thing. (Thanks to Angela for consistently badgering me into doing this when I asked her to.)
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