Jerry Wu

Check out this blog post from my teammate Brandon Lin about how we migrated our mobile rendering codebase to use Typescript without disrupting developers!

9

🌟 Attention Engineering Managers and Technical Leaders! 🌟 In just two weeks, on June 28th at 10 AM PDT, I’m excited to host an interactive roundtable on Feature Flags and Delivery in conjunction with ELC! 🚀 Why Attend? This is a collaborative discussion where your expertise and curiosity are key! Whether you're experienced or eager to learn, your contributions are invaluable. 🔍 Discussion Points: - Decoupling Processes - Boosting Team Efficiency - Optimizing Feature Delivery - Tracking Platform Usage Expect rich conversations on best practices, unique implementations, methodologies, and the latest tools enhancing feature flagging and delivery. Who Should Join? - Engineering Managers - Technical Leads - DevOps Engineers - Software Developers This roundtable is your chance to: - Share your experiences - Gain new insights - Network with peers - Discover practical recommendations RSVP Now and mark your calendars for June 28th at 10 AM PDT! Let’s collaborate and elevate our skills together! #EngineeringManagement #TechLeaders #FeatureFlags #DevOps #SoftwareDevelopment #TeamEfficiency #TechRoundtable

9

Interesting conversation for those just beginning their careers, in engineering or beyond. Thanks for sharing Andy Greenwell!

3

1 Comment

Observation: 9/10 SWE's quit at “reading the docs”. Cut through the BS with this easy trick: Take action and build. Writing code is 100x easier than the docs make it sound. “Reading the docs” gave me crazy imposter syndrome: -Git -WPF -Kafka -OAuth -Angular -GraphQL -RabbitMQ -Kubernetes In ALL cases, I conquered my fears by building. Except for WPF. I gave up on that. And Kafka, that's for another day. Forcing yourself to build/code/deploy melts analysis paralysis. Then you'll say "oh that was pretty easy". Trust me, we aren't building rockets. Practice AND Study build true mastery.

22

1 Comment

Whew, fellow engineering managers, do we need to talk? We had more yeses to these three questions than either front-line engineers OR execs: 📈 I do not feel the potential for advancement in my current role 🚀 Leadership at my company is out of the loop when it comes to engineering challenges 💥 I do not feel secure in my current role. Pair that with the 69% of EMs who’ve experienced burnout in the past year and it’s enough to make even the best of us look at the engineer/manager pendulum with renewed interest. For me, the saving grace is the big improvements we as an engineering industry have made on informing and driving the business strategy over the decades I’ve been in tech, and wanting to stay in the room where it happens. Check out the 2024 State of Engineering Management to think about where you and your team falls on the trends we're all experiencing firsthand. (And for funsies, you won’t believe which group thinks AI is a gimmick. ✨)

12

🚀 Understanding Hick’s Law in Product Management 🚀 Have you ever felt stuck choosing between too many options? That’s Hick’s Law at play! Learn how simplifying choices can dramatically improve user experience in my latest Medium article. In this article, I dive into: How to make sign-up processes smoother 📝 Streamlining UIs for better usability 💻 Prioritizing what really matters to users ⭐ Strategies to prevent information overload ⚖️ Let’s keep it simple and effective! Discover the power of Hick’s Law and how it can transform your product management approach. #ProductManagement #UXDesign #HicksLaw #UserExperience #Simplicity #DesignPrinciples

3

Reads of the week Engineering — Autotuner: How to Speed Up Your Rails App https://lnkd.in/gdeMVPiq Redis Licensing Changes and You: https://lnkd.in/gUkYWKhJ authenticate_by: Prevent timing-based enumeration of users: https://lnkd.in/gKgf4SRx Kueue is a cloud-native job queueing system for batch, HPC, AI/ML, and similar applications in a Kubernetes cluster: https://kueue.sigs.k8s.io/ NodeJS 22: Require() Support & WebSockets: https://lnkd.in/gw-8PPEJ Some Volumes Were Slow And We Figured Out Why: https://lnkd.in/gJ5GTxfi Repos — Versatile Instant Voice Cloing: https://lnkd.in/ghHq5fVC AI — Why AI is failing at giving good advice: https://lnkd.in/gEcTRT4P Snowflake releases a flagship generative AI model of its own: https://lnkd.in/g68fGa7e Developing rapidly with Generative AI: https://lnkd.in/ggGt-Uj6 Nice Reads — IBM to Acquire HashiCorp, Inc. Creating a Comprehensive End-to-End Hybrid Cloud Platform: https://lnkd.in/gkr6eTRW Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much laying off 1,500 employees negatively affected the streaming giant’s operations: https://lnkd.in/gasqzWuu

6

I've been writing TypeScript without understanding it https://lnkd.in/gWGyAZyf for those who want a little more in-depth explanation of typescript and things it offers.

2

I feel like an imposter almost every day 😓 When I think about it logically, I know I'm great at my job. I love engineering and I deliver results. But then... Someone mentions something unfamiliar. Or assumes I know something I don't. And that nagging voice returns: "You don't belong here." I don't have all the answers, but here's what helps me: 1. Success doesn't cure it. If anything, achievement amplifies it as expectations grow. 2. Life beyond work matters. Family time, exercise, and playing piano ground me. 3. Weekly counseling sessions are invaluable for my mental health. Imposter syndrome is a common struggle, especially in tech. What works for you? Share your tips below – let's support each other in this journey! #ImposterSyndrome #MentalHealth #TechLife

45

5 Comments

Is this valid TypeScript? Why or why not? I 💖 type safety. I recently gave an engineering talk on it at Stay AI and this line of code helps explains the differences between values and types in TypeScript quite succinctly.

6

Want to know more about How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale? Still skeptical of why we built horizontal sharding on RDS instead of <insert-cooler-database-technology>? Wondering if you should copy what we did? Check out out my new podcast with Software Engineering Daily as we dive deep on spicy stories that didn't make the blog post from surviving my first Figma Config conference to debating which database technology comes out on top. https://lnkd.in/gFfh7C-A

150

9 Comments

Protip: If you use a 3rd-party API in your app, check in frequently. APIs change. One of my favorite projects, my resume map (https://lnkd.in/g8zbx_H), was based on Mapbox's Javascript library and used Stamen's toner map. Stamen decided to shift their tile service to Stadia Maps. Mapbox decided to update its library and rebrand it as MapLibre. Ever break all the things? So, after a few quick updates, it's back online, just as pretty as it ever was. #map #maplibre #stamen #stadia #gis

9

2 Comments

Pro Tip: Start your day with a really small ticket (~15 min of work). Something tiny like a refactor. It's a great way to "warm up" and get into the zone for bigger tasks. #softwareengineering

55

21 Comments

First off Larry Diehl is one of the brightest ppl I ever had the pleasure to work with. His technical insights and experience are only matched by his pragmatic approach in building products. I've personally witnessed and experienced him doing so in complicated dense domains and his discipline, awareness, and ability to navigate complex + dense topics (e.g. type theory and formal verification) while keeping a pragmatic product development roadmap is truly astonishing. Secondly, I've had the privilege of seeing Larry build Colimit in real-time! It truly is a seamless gateway to bring reliability and thoroughness to apis backed by solid and principled fundamentals. Like it or not...everyone building APIs IS building distributed systems. However, not all of us have the time, expertise, and skills to build and test them reliably. Larry Diehl and Colimit are paving the way to bring that to the masses. It's truly a space that needs more love and attention. Hoping to bring Colimit to some of our teams in due time too! Super excited for what's to come! #formalverification #distributedsystems #apis

14

1 Comment

I'm sure there are a few of you out there wondering what I have been up to since I left Cadence. I was lucky enough to join a terrific startup called Metrics Design Automation. I’d like to tell you how wonderful our products are, but it would be better if you saw for yourself. If you have any interest in simulation, please go to www.metrics.ca and check it out! While you're there, watch a couple of the videos we put together that show you how easy it is to get started with DSim.

29

1 Comment

Its about solving the problem, not 'having AI' in the system. This is from last March, but the Wave 1 vs. Wave 2 distinction does seem to be playing out. Less 'generate me content', more 'synthesize vast amounts of relevant data and aid in decisonmaking or signal extraction'. https://lnkd.in/ehFBFC32 They don't talk about multi-agent systems here, but looking forward to more startups with a focus on leveraging agentic design patterns (https://lnkd.in/ed5rMmFe) to streamline real world workflows.

4

1 Comment

I'm rewriting my WIP typechecker to relieve stress. How do you relieve stress?? I'm updating it from a monolith struct that had all of the type logic in one spot to a struct that takes an array of composable rules. The main struct visits statements and expressions in the AST then calls the appropriate methods on the rule structs. A few thoughts... First of all this makes testing much easier. There are already nearly 500 tests written for the lexer, parser, and typechecker. Most of those are integration level tests. These are amazing at detection but horrible at both locating the cause of issues and writing specific test cases. Breaking the type checking logic in to "rules" allows me to write unit tests for specific cases and broader integration tests for a really nice blend of code coverage. It's also much easier to read through and understand how different parts of the type checking work. The original monolith version was 1500 lines using a lot of recursion. Recursion is still used but creating encapsulation around units of code makes understanding the parts and the whole easier. I'm still working through breaking apart the monolith typechecker, porting over type checking logic, and getting all 450+ tests passing. I'm hoping to open source the code soon and do an actual write up.

4

If you're an engineer who has good ideas but can't get them noticed, this might help: 1. Spend a few days improving your writing. People don't read—they scan. Learn to write in one punchy paragraph instead of the three. Plus, writing scales better than talking face-to-face. 2. Learn the absolute basics of visual design. Ideas that look ugly seem bad. Ideas that look pretty seem good. It only takes a few days to pick up the basics of layout geometry and color selection. 3. Get a good salesperson to teach you about the basics of sales psychology. Learn to appeal to other people's interests, not your own. Make your idea their idea. None of this is deceptive. If your ideas are good, everyone benefits.

109

14 Comments

I love this excerpt from Ryan Peterman on engineering writing. I echo the sentiment that as engineers we aren't taught how to write, at least not in any career-specific manner. In neither school nor industry have I experienced an externally-driven focus on its development as a skill. Despite this, it is massively important to growth. Nearly every time I have received commendation in any role it has been driven more by my ability to communicate and rally people around technical ideas, rather than the raw technical ideas or contributions themselves. Writing is a big part of that. I'd encourage any engineer with ambition for growth to make skill development in this area a top priority.

3

1 Comment