Most good organisations expect their engineering hires to have gone through a system design interview. For a vast majority of people this might sound like a weird thing to do as most people don’t individually design large scale systems. So expecting someone to design a highly scalable and available system in less than 60 minutes is a daunting task. We must also consider the fact that not everyone gets to work in organisations that build large scale distributed systems. I think the time when I worked in FactSet was when I dealt with extremely large volumes of data and we focussed on the performance of queries from the database to sub 5 ms in order to ensure that even with latency, users would be able to see their graphs plotted in a second or so. Most applications wouldn’t really care about performance at that level because for their line business it probably doesn’t matter that much. ...

Featured image: Photo of Group of Men Wearing Assorted Scarves Holding Sticks What is culture? You are probably tired of seeing this word mentioned in countless job descriptions and conversations in and outside your organisation. “That’s not the culture here.” Or “that’s our culture”. Or “we have a transparent culture”. Quite often this is just an abuse of the term culture. But because it is popular, it makes those making the claims feel like they work at a great organisation. ...

Featured image: Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels Preamble “Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” - Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams by Amy Edmondson, 1999. That is an impressive definition and one that is easy to understand by anyone who reads it. ...

What is invisible work? Work that is done by someone or a group of people that is not tracked anywhere is invisible work! This could be something that is an interruption to your day, this could be a side project that you are doing with someone else in your organisation, or anything along these lines, that is not covered as part of your daily stand-up or updates. In fact, no one apart from those involved in the work know that this work is being done and it doesn’t really have many stakeholders apart from the ones doing the work. ...

There will be a time in your career where you start to think, I have been doing what I’m assigned really well. I would like to do more. Maybe this time, I should lead people. What do you think you need, in order to start working on leadership? Attend a leadership course? Read a book? That is a good start. Wouldn’t it be great if there was one place where you could go to find out what you needed to become a good leader? ...

Featured Image courtesy Miguel Á. Padriñán. I recently ran into a small issue with this blog. The credentials that Github workflows use to deploy the application had expired. As someone who doesn’t login to Azure on a daily basis and whose primary role is not application development on the cloud, I did not see this coming. So my Github action to deploy this blog failed with the following message: AADSTS7000222: The provided client secret keys for app '***' are expired. Visit the Azure portal to create new keys for your app: https://aka.ms/NewClientSecret, or consider using certificate credentials for added security: https://aka.ms/certCreds. Trace ID: bd3c9b5a-5677-4dbf-9136-78883da00700 Correlation ID: cdd461df-0722-4770-9b9a-d97e29181d94 Timestamp: 2022-04-18 18:07:59Z I understood that a credential had expired, which logically meant that I had to reset the credentials for the account/service principal that was being used by the continuous deployment setup for this blog. ...

Are you a people leader, someone whose role involves a lot of influencing others to work towards objectives? Are you a mentor to someone who is at your level or junior whom you are helping navigate their career? Anyone in either of these roles will have conversations that help their coachee/mentee identify goals that matter to them, realise what needs to be done to get there, reflect on what and how they have been doing so far and to encourage them to get to their goals consistently. That is the role of a coach. This sounds like something that is relatively easy to do. But in my experience, it is not. ...

Featured image courtesy https://www.pexels.com/photo/ground-group-growth-hands-461049/ Are you a people leader in a company? What do I mean by a people leader? It is someone who is in charge of managing people and their development, ensuring those people in your care have the room to grow and get the recognition and opportunities they deserve. This is a very difficult role as it is not meant for the selfish. To lead is a unique responsibility where you take ownership of your team’s mistakes while giving credit and celebrating their wins. To lead in a way, is to serve. ...

What are submodules in git? If you have worked in software development, you have certainly been developing your application using libraries or packages developed by others, whether it is open-source or not. It could be that your project A depends on a project B both of which are from different git repositories in your organisation. What happens when you want to be able to treat the two projects as separate yet still be able to use one from within the other? ...

Agile ways of working In today’s world, every software company claims to be agile. This post is a condensed version of the official Scrum Guide. I have not changed the intent of the guide but have added context based on my experience and removed details where I felt it was obvious. However it is true that what is obvious to me may not be obvious to another person. So if something in this post doesn’t agree with your understanding of scrum, please read the scrum guide. ...