Book highlights - Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner

Organizational health lies in being able to work together. As a manager, our job is to try as much as we can to drive balance and clarity. A happy, driven team sees the wider purpose of their work and also feels empowered to execute tasks individually. “You can’t call yourself a leader by coming into a situation that is by nature uncertain, ambiguous—and create confusion. You have to create clarity where none exists....

March 16, 2023 · 4 min · Karn Wong

Book highlights - The Staff Engineer's Path by Tanya Reilly

Opportunity cost Staff engineers’ skills are usually in high demand. If you’re assigned to a single team, you may not be top of mind for solving a problem elsewhere in the org, or your manager may be unwilling to let you go. Losing empathy It’s easy to overfocus and forget that the rest of the world exists, or start thinking of other technology areas as trivial compared to your rich, nuanced domain....

March 15, 2023 · 12 min · Karn Wong

Load balancer 101, thou shalt not be alone

Scaling, the dreaded word among developers, because this means more complexity. But why do we need scaling? Imagine a super busy corner store. During early mornings, there might not be a lot of customers, so one cashier might be enough to handle all customers. But during afternoons or evenings, more customers would flock to the store, and our only cashier couldn’t checkout fast enough, and this means losing potential customers....

December 10, 2022 · 2 min · Karn Wong

Cross-platform package (+env) management with Nix

For many years, installing a package on linux means either: Compiling a binary from source, then install it. -> I think we know why this didn’t catch on for the mass. Downloading a compiled binary for your system’s architecture and platform. -> This requires you to also move the executable to something like /usr/local/bin otherwise it won’t be discoverable throughout the system. Using system’s package manager: apt, apk, yum, brew, etc....

December 3, 2022 · 4 min · Karn Wong

Load credentials into your shell via Bitwarden CLI - Fish edition

Recently I work with GitHub CLI a lot, and having to constantly fire up Bitwarden app to retrieve GITHUB_TOKEN gets old real fast… I was thinking of storing it in a gist in a password manager, luckily someone had the same idea and implemented it. The only issue is that I use fish shell. But we live in a world where there are many ways to interact with the shell, so it follows that you can translate zsh syntax to fish syntax....

November 29, 2022 · 1 min · Karn Wong