Starting as an engineering manager As an engineering manager you already have a lot of responsibilities. At an early stage in your engineering manager career, you could even feel overwhelmed by the amount of things you have to know. Some of them include Mentoring and coaching your direct reports who are individual contributors Setting strategic objectives for the team and the individuals Performance management - performance improvement programs Recruiting the right engineers for your team, squad and organisation Preparing promotion packs for your engineers Liaising with the people team to ensure benefits and compensation are attractive enough for bringing in new talent Working with Product and Peers to ensure delivery is smooth and dependencies are communicated and coordinated It doesn’t end there and the list goes on....

What is Homebrew? Homebrew is a package manager for MacOS and Linux systems. Although it is called homebrew, the command is shortened to brew. The thing about homebrew is that every command and option sticks to the theme of brewing. I haven’t gone and dug out why this is the case, but I found it amusing. As I had used homebrew a couple of times when setting up my work laptop and now setting up my own, I got curious and wanted to know what options the command accepted....

Background So you got your brand new MacBook Pro. And now you are dreading the time you are going to spend setting it all up. I was. It is a time sink. So I made a little guide that is selfishly for myself in the future if I were to format this one or buy another one. Someday I’ll script it all as a brew bundle and just install it....

Background I have been an avid reader since about 2016. A friend of mine at work introduced me into the world of non-fiction books. And I got hooked. Since then I have read more than a 100 books. I mean do have a life and a full time job, so I think it is pretty good that I manage to read at least 10 books a years, but 2018 was probably the year I read a lot more than the others....

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....