Ask any experienced engineer, and they will tell you that software engineering is much more than writing code.

When I began my career, having a reference or overview of what to expect and the skills to work on would have helped me to level up much faster!

1/4 I've always wanted to create such a reference and after a year and a half of creating shorts, deep dives and producing podcast episodes, with amazing folks from our industry:

The Knowledge Graph (2023) is now ready!

2/4

The importance of system design is not in defining an “instruction set” for your engineering teams to follow.

The real value is communication. Let me explain - a thread 🧵 Experienced engineers and architects often mistake their technical designs & architecture diagrams as blueprints for what their engineering colleagues should implement.

Often these designs are plagued with uncertainty & what is built is different from the original ideas

When joining a new team or switching teams, it's always difficult ramping up to a new code base, especially when it's substantially large and a few years old.

Here's how to break through:

💡 thread of the day Quite often, the documentation doesn't match the code, some areas of the codebase don't make sense, and if that team is using a framework or a programming language you're not familiar with, things get much worse!

I’ve worked with a lot of different teams, different dynamics, diverse backgrounds, cultures, and ways of working etc.

A consistent sign of natural leadership & seniority is when someone joins a team & they

>> Quickly understand the roles & functions already fulfilled. I’m not referring to titles. I’m talking about team dynamics roles:

- the joker
- the architect
- the quiet tech wizard
- the organizer
- the true leader
- the junior
- the team lead wannabe
- the ambitious
- etc.

>>

The future is here.

I’ve been procrastinating for months creating a blog where I can put my content & add some metadata.

Today, I decided it’s time. With the help of @github pages, @jekyllrb ChatGPT, Copilot I finished in 4 hours what would take days:

blog.glich.stream With GitHub Pages, Jekyll & the awesome Chirpy theme, I had a fully functioning & configured static site in the first hour

github.com/cotes2020/jeky…

As part of preparing for the Twitter Space that I moderated yesterday about "Twitter", I found some pretty awesome engineering blog posts about the great work done there.

Here's the list: 1/ Starting with an infrastructure & storage, this great writeup (from 2017) by @mazdakh is a fantastic overview of the high level network topology and the diverse storage solutions (3rd party or built in-house).

Once such solution is "Manhattan"

blog.twitter.com/engineering/en…

As the Twitter situation unfolds, here are “my opinions” on what’s happening

🧵👇 1/ The layoffs, the restructuring, the push for efficiency and revenue increase are textbook plays from how private equity firms run the companies they acquire

The difference here is that it’s all unfolding in public

Your company is growing and you have no clue how to deal with all your new hires.

Here are 5 tips for you

🧵1/6 1. If you're abandoning your new hires OR you're flooding them with information, you're doing it wrong!

Build a guided path for information that will get them up to speed as fast as possible. Avoid the fluff, & cut to the chase!

2/6

I will donate 100$ to charity if you help me find a software engineer who is both good at and enjoys effort estimates!

Let's talk about how to make effort estimates more tolerable and slightly more useful 🧵

And if you don't like reading, I got you :) We all hate effort estimates and we're all bad at them. For a reason!

Building software is "complex". The systems we help build can have emergent properties and behaviours that are quite complicated!

2/8

At some point, in everyone's tech careers, the time spent on refining technical skills will lead to generating less business value.

The law of diminishing returns kicks-in.

Let me explain – a 🧵 1/ As professional software engineers working in for-profit organizations (whatever the scale) our main objective is to increase business value.

This is an umbrella objective under-which everything else falls.

🤦‍♂️ I don’t like this. At all. There is a fictitious chasm between those who work in “big tech” and those who do not.

This divide has been artificially manufactured and inflated by those who pray on the insecurities of people disillusioned by the prestige of working in FANNG 1/ Big tech are not engineering utopias. Far from it!

Bad practices, tech debt, bad management, politics, lack of standards, and bad strategic decisions are very real and vary in intensity from team to team.

Trainings every company should offer to its software engineering teams but isn't!

short 🧵 1/ LICENSES: every software engineer uses code created by others and, more often than not, that code is distributed under a specific license.

Very few developers understand the differences between the many types of licenses "especially" those used with open source software.

The exodus towards #Web3 is fueled by tech fatigue, opportunism and a fear of missing out (FOMO). A developer’s perspective 🧵 Developers and hackers at heart are always lured by good challenges and puzzles. It doesn’t matter if those challenges makes business sense or not.

It also does not matter if these are solved problems.

What matters is the novelty of the challenge for the developer!

I got this great question in my inbox and here's my answer to it - a 🧵 (1/6)

#SoftwareDevelopment #Management A healthy workplace environment would encourage early communication and expectation management. There would never be "unexpected delays" there will always be "expected and well communicated delays".

2/6

I spent 300$ on my first NFT and I regret it. A thread 🧵

1/18 I’m not new to the whole cryptocurrencies / blockchain space. In fact, I bought and sold bitcoins throughout its lifecycle. I am new to the NFT space and let’s just say, I’m not impressed.

2/18

Working in Tech and relocating to Europe or the USA is NOT about merit. Let me explain, a thread 🧵 #Programming #SoftwareEngineering 1/ People born in countries with limited accessibility to the west share a common misconception that finding a job and relocating to a western country is about merit or having above average skills.