One of my cofounder friends asked me how much downtime we have when deploying code and I looked her dead in the eye and said, "What downtime? We don't have any downtime when we deploy. If we do, something's gone wrong." So I prodded her for more context on why she asked... Apparently her engineers are deploying and these deploys or upgrades take the site down hours at a time during business hours. And they're running on AWS, so zero downtime deploys are possible. But she acknowledges that there is a culture problem for shipping.

How the hell do I have an 810 credit score and still get rejected for an auto loan by @Chase? I've never missed a credit card payment and have a credit history of 11 years, this doesn't make sense. And I definitely have more than enough income to afford the vehicle. Like, wtf? Can somebody who works in fintech/banking please explain this to me, because I'm lost. This algorithm's output isn't making sense. Unless they penalize folks that pay off things early, so they can maximize their profits through interest payments and I'm a liability? 🤔

As I've gotten older and eventually reached Senior Software Engineer, I constantly think about how little I knew in comparison to when I first started out. Yeah, I could code my ass off, but there's a lot of areas I was lacking. Being Senior is about being able to do cross-organizational work for getting projects done. It's not just how well you can code. Also, it's about mentorship and helping level up others and making the lives of other engineers easier as well.

Folks always ask me the reasons why I joined and left my jobs, here's a thread of each one and where my head was at for joining and (where applicable) leaving. 1. First job out of college at a big company I had joined there because I thought I'd be doing robotics and computer vision but got switched into a different R&D division. I didn't have mentorship there and left for a startup in NYC to grow more and be more challenged.

So far, I'm really enjoying the remote and engineering culture at GitHub. I can see how they've had success with a remote workforce, pretty much EVERYTHING (like, literally everything) is documented and organized for everything. It's awesome. Additionally, this is the first time I've worked at a company where the team explicitly says, "Nobody really 'owns' a PR or specific feature." It's cool to see somebody open up a PR, get code review from a teammate, and the same teammate can go and make the fixes later on.