Tina Wu

Really excited to share I'll be delivering a talk "Starting from nothing" at StaffPlus in New York on September 4th 2024. Staff engineers make for an excellent advance party, someone you give a problem like “build a new product” and know they’ll turn that ask into an actionable plan, eventually releasing something great. Sounds great, right? Well, not exactly. You may be the first to scope out the project, but you’ll need to build a team to help you deliver on it. Once you have a team you’ll need a vision that can excite and inspire them, as it’s unlikely you’ll deliver the quality of outcome within the timelines needed without one. Complicating things, it’s probably a poor choice for you to take an ‘official’ leadership position within a team: you’ll need to steer, support and drive the team all from within. I've spent years being this person, helping lead company initiatives at GoCardless and then at incident.io, the most recent example being our On-call product. This talk will share some of the tough lessons learned I've learned along the way. Whether you're tackling your first big project or leading your tenth, you'll leave with strategies that might save you some sleep. Look forward to seeing you there! LeadDev

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It's my first post on the Gusto engineering blog, and it's all about #RailsConf! https://lnkd.in/e4zCVUQ4

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Friendly reminder that if you Typescript, your types are a lie. No type checking at runtime. If you call an external system there is ZERO guarantee on type accuracy. You STILL need some form of contract checking at runtime. I use jo for all incoming and outgoing data.

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I have a question for software teams that meet ISO-27001 / SOC 2 Type II *and* who use outsourced software development with git. Do you have all your contractors sign all your policies so they can contribute to your codebase directly? Or do you have the outsourced team work in a separate git repository and then have an employee merge to the main repo? Or some other model?

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Progress = your QA release process growing from 15 minutes to 5 hours. A stat that’s both invigorating & frustrating at the same time. But I think the single best thing you can do to delight your customers is to personally guarantee “it just works”.

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🏎️💨 Making of a Ridiculously Fast™ API client in R. Why my package is **~17x faster** than the community alternatives that call the **exact same API endpoints**. 👇🏽**design choices matter** ✨ https://lnkd.in/ggi_2XyQ

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Stand Up! I am still looking for a job. If anyone has their sights on a full stack and/or frontend role, please keep me in mind. Yesterday, I largely dedicated myself to the job hunt. Every time I do something -- including coding -- I feel a supreme about of guilt for not applying to more jobs, even though I've applied to 138 in the past 2 weeks... Having said that, I did set up the pipeline to interact with system files in Electron. The safest solution is to define a promise in the main directory -> invoke the promise in the preload directory -> and trigger the invoked promise via event listener in the renderer. Since main, preload, and renderer all instantiate at different times, this works via string reference, so it's important to componentize said string and import it when needed. Today, I'll wrap up CRUD to interact with .md files in root and devote any extra time to styling changes in the Frog management and custom interval dialogs. Follow along! https://lnkd.in/dh7w6RHg

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🌟 TailorMed Interview Insight 🌟 In software development interviews, one of my favorite follow-up questions after a candidate explains some tech magic is, "How does X happen?". If your answer is, "The IDE/Tech-Stack/Whatever does it for me," that’s not what I'm looking for. I want to hear an in-depth solution, to see how you can break down the problem, and understand the process. Even if you don't know the answer, trying and giving it an in-depth thought will help me understand your thought process better. Hint: I don't always know the answer myself! Think critically, analyze, and explain step-by-step. This demonstrates your deep understanding and problem-solving skills, which are crucial for any developer. #TechInterview #SoftwareDevelopment #ProblemSolving #DeepThinking #CareerTips #SoftwareEngineering

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My love/hate with Amazon continues. Looking to buy a power strip and half the products have reviews like "Caught fire," "nearly burned down my house," "scorched my outlet," "broke after 2 months"... but next day shipping be like 😍 ^^ Posted by me to Facebook, February 2020 Sometimes all you need to beat your competition is to be faster: faster to get into the hands of consumers, faster to release new features, faster to respond to support tickets. You can have a worse product but win on “SPEED”. * McDonald’s is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise partially because their “fast food” was so much faster (and consistent) compared to the competition. * Amazon shopping is HUGE because of 2-day shipping. * Instant downloads/instant streaming have completely taken over software, video games, and media consumption. If you’re looking for business ideas, take an existing product or business and make it “faster”.

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By choosing Dropbox, you not only save time but also enhance your team's collaboration capabilities and provide effortless access to your most important files. 🏆According to a Principled Technologies study conducted in 2023, Dropbox outperformed its competitors in 289 out of 336 comparisons of file uploading, downloading, and syncing. Dive into the findings at the link below.

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Cognition clarifies, conceding to critics? In yesterday's thread announcing increased availability in their closed beta, Cognition took time to acknowledge the misleading promotional claim investigated by YouTube channel "Internet of Bugs. As promised, I've updated my "Dissecting Devin" article to include their comments. Overall I'm pleased with their decision to engage positively with measured criticism. If Autonomous DevTools will take a helpful place the software development process, it will take a lot of clear thinking to get it right. Article --> https://lnkd.in/gWxrRSy9 VIdeo --> https://lnkd.in/gKJwgMie

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It's been a couple weeks since I stepped into the role of Engineering Manager. At my company its a hybrid role - the goal is 50% managing the team, 50% coding/building. Now that I've had a couple weeks doing both its clear - coding is easier than managing 😂 #softwareengineering #leadership

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SWE Industry: Never manipulate strings in Prod if it can be avoided, and if seen in a PR by a staff/principal engineer would immediately be rejected Job Market: Manipulate these strings in weird ways on this assessment so you can get this job... Wild, if you are interviewing software engineers, give them real world problems to solve, not some arbitrary random string manipulation that we would never do in production. You're likely missing out on a lot of talented people.

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I was reading this article and thought to speak my mind on the matter. As a software engineer that has personally dealt with UTC related issues, I have a harder time seeing the value for storing timestamps in the user’s local time zone. This comes from several personal experiences when attempting to reference the data when it is stored in each way. Storing timestamps in UTC can be seen as greatly beneficial. When a timestamp is stored in UTC, that value can be understood as a single reference point that can be applied to any region in the world. The only adjustment you need is to apply the user’s time zone offset. In my own experience, you still must be forward thinking about instances such as states with several time zones and potential adjustments for daylight savings. In very rare cases, the storage of UTC values can come with too much variablility than it’s worth. If a timestamp is being stored for strictly the user, then it might be considered a better practice to store the timestamp locally. This can result in reduce function calls as well as mitigating possible scenarios of displaying the wrong date/time. However, if that timestamp needs to be referenced in a different time zone, then you must adjust for the difference. Achieved by converting it to UTC by stripping the local offset then applying the user’s offset or by comparing the two time zones and adjust it accordingly. In my professional opinion, software engineers should consider the storage of timestamp values in UTC as the gold standard. It gives the engineer more flexibility to utilize the value in different regions by applying a single offset. When attempting to troubleshoot a difference in a date/time, it is easier to identify where the miscalculation occurs.

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Early in my career I had a boss that said “ if I can’t develop you into replacing me, I have failed at being your senior “. This has stuck with me till date. We hear all the buzz words around being inclusive but people early in their careers and late in their career are at a disadvantage right now even for an opportunity to interview. When I graduated the economy was in the dumpster and I still have the 250 rejection emails from companies refusing to interview me. Let’s try and help the next generation of software engineers. #softwareengineering #jobs #interviews #mentoring

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Should the entire development team attend all of the sprint events? No, because it’s inefficient and a waste of time. Right? Years ago I battled a tough client who didn't want the developers to attend the Sprint Review. He wanted them to, in his words, “just keep coding”. I argued…how will the team learn about what the customer and the business needs? His predictable answer was “better requirements documentation”. Software engineers are professionals who need to deeply understand the problems to be solve. The intent of sprint events is to provide context for these problems and enable collaboration. Ask your developers if they are receiving value from sprint events. If not, don't exclude them. Fix the events so they enable the development team. #scrum #agile #collaboration

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Given this job market, companies are hiring more senior roles and less junior ones. This is going to be disastrous in ~5 years when the normal bench of junior engineers who could have leveled up to senior will be in short supply. There will be a real gap in our bench that used to be built out by both big tech and startups.

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🚀 Breaking News: FTC Bans Noncompetes! 🚀 The FTC just published a new exciting rule that will go in effect in 6 months that essentially bans companies from issuing non-competes to their employees. It will empower workers with more freedom to change jobs, start new ventures, and innovate. This move expects to create 8,500 new businesses annually and increase worker earnings. This decisive action not only boosts innovation but also aims to lower healthcare costs by up to ~$200 billion over the next decade. A big win for competition and innovation! #FTC #Innovation #WorkerFreedom #NoncompeteBan #BusinessGrowth Source: https://lnkd.in/gCqNVeqk

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