lead software engineer on a break, writer, creator of #basecs, #baseds, @basecspodcast, byte sized. she/her
bhavatu sabbamangalam 🌻
Jun 3, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
i had a Big Moment today: i withdrew from a hiring process for a role after i realized the company wasn't a good fit.
it took me nearly 7 years of working in tech to FINALLY feel empowered enough to say no to a potential job and put my own goals and psychological safety first.
i wish i go back and could tell past vaidehi that it is completely okay to say no to something if it doesn't feel right and that she'll be just fine and will find a place that is the right place for her and that she is not an imposter and she does very much deserve to be here. ❤️
Jun 2, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
our constant demand for systems with high availability and perpetual uptime is fueled by—you guessed it—capitalism.
this realization came to me today when i thought about al the various conversations i’ve had with tech stakeholders where someone insisted that “X amount of downtime is unacceptable”.
Jun 2, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
living in portland for the past four years has provided me with many clear examples of global warming.
it used to be that the longest days of the year in june were cloudy or rainy—springtime weather. last night, on june 1st, it was nearly 90 degrees at 9pm.
this is not normal.
just four years ago, you never really needed air conditioning for portland summers; most residences don’t even have them! you used to just keep your windows open.
that reality is changing quite rapidly, and i’m guessing that this trend is going to continue out of necessity.
Jun 1, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
i absolutely loved this stellar piece by @ferdeline on why and how to leverage containers in order to build more sustainable software in the latest issue of @IncrementMag!! 🤩
1. while the location of a server is an important consideration (hello, green regions!) we need to think about server utilization. so much energy goes into servers running that aren't actually being utilized to their full capacity, which is wasteful!
May 26, 2021 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
it's great to see more tech companies abandoning whiteboarding interviews. but you know what i'd really love to see? more companies adding a diversity + inclusion interview to their hiring practices.
just imagine the ways in which that single change could impact our workplaces.
given the breakdown of the majority of tech workers (read: white, cisgender, male), it would be SUCH a paradigm shift for companies to start screening for employees who care about making their team more welcoming to people who don't look like them
Mar 23, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
the best engineers i've worked with are not ones who write "great" code (whatever that means!) but instead are the ones who are extremely skilled communicators.
when i think of the truly brilliant engineers that i've worked with and learned from, everything that they brought to our team and company had to do with how well they communicated with others.
Mar 7, 2021 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
dear lord tech hiring is so deeply broken. there are some serious flaws here, and the saddest thing is that the people with the power to make hiring decisions don’t seem to have the self-awareness to realize why this is bad and who is being excluded in the process.
when most of your recruiting is done internally (using the numbers provided in this thread, 98% of their employees are hired through internal recruiting/referrals), you ensure that every new employee you are was selected by people you already have on your team.
Mar 5, 2021 • 14 tweets • 2 min read
this has gotten me into trouble recently but whatever
here are some of vaidehi’s spicy cooking takes
go cast iron or stainless steel
everything else is bad
Feb 27, 2021 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
women of twitter: raise your hand if you’ve ever discovered that a male colleague with the same (or less!) years of experience and same job title as you was actually making more money?
i’ll go first: 🙋🏽♀️
i’ll never forget the feelings i experience when i found this out. initially, i felt shock, followed immediately by self-loathing—it seemed like the company had gotten me “on the cheap” and it made me feel incredibly like i had been incredibly stupid to not negotiate for more.
May 27, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
i've noticed a lot of new "how to monetize you side project" content recently, where the advice is to put your content behind a paywall. i want to specifically call out/thank all the folks who did _not_ do this: those of us who couldn't always afford the resources thank you ❤️
i've been approached by a lot of companies and orgs to collaborate on or create content. with the exception of one very specific situation involving a physical object that needed to be created/produced/shipped, i've never put my content behind a paywall.
Aug 23, 2018 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I was rejected by Etsy one year into my career. At the end of the a long day of interviews, they asked me to code a CS problem (Conway's Game of Life) in a language that I definitely didn't know (PHP). #shareyourrejections
After the interview, I went home and read everything I could about Conway's Game of Life. I didn't understand a lot of it. So then I started reading about other computer science problems, hoping one of them would make more sense to me.
I've been in this industry for some years now and yet people still assume that I'm very junior because I give talks about how hexadecimals work (apparently that's "too basic" for a conference).
Jul 28, 2017 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
In today's edition of "oh my god everything is so freaking interconnected", I learned a W I L D thing about JavaScript's parseInt function:
You're probably already be familiar with how parseInt() works; it converts a string into an integer, based on the radix/base you pass to it.
