Karachi Wala Developer

While mentoring some students with technical interviews, I documented what I find to be most important qualities of a software developer or engineer. While a quick google search online will find mixed reviews, most people feel that technical skills are most important. However I feel a bit differently about this, and in this episode share the things all software engineers should focus on and how they can improve them selves if lacking.

The recent failure of the startup Fast got me thinking of things one needs to be aware of while considering to join a startup and things to observe while working in one. This episode covers some basics to what you can do before and after joining which should help you prepare better for the risks involved while working in a startup.

This episode was inspired by the following post: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-fast?s=r

Technical Due Diligence (DD) for startups is not something we think about until the time really comes in. When we get the list of questions or get asked those dreaded questions that we always knew would come to haunt us. In this episode I share about what is the process and what to expect from this, so that one can be better prepared when this happens.

T-Shaped developers are those interested in learning across a breadth of technologies ranging from frontend to backend to devops. In this episode we try to understand why would we want to diversify vs specialise and is there a better option between the two?

Do you feel your team is very sluggish and not moving fast enough? Do you feel there are constant blockers which are stopping the features to get shipped? In this episode I dive into the world of engineering performance and what are some thing of the useful things you can measure, and which ones are not meant to be measured at all.

You might have been reading about one of the dozen multi-million dollar investments made into startup recently. And you might be wondering how do I get a piece of that action. Most companies now offer their shares to employees through whats called an ESOP. This allows you to accrue value over time and if the company wins big - so do you! This and more in this episode.

PCI DSS is a security standard certification which a company requires if they have card payment integrations on their websites. However its one of those topics which sounds scary, not talked about enough and is very specific to each company. So understanding even if it is a requirement for your company becomes a pain. In this episode I share my experience going through the certification with Sastaticket and what I learnt during that.

In order to write faster code you need to understand (or profile) your current code and visually or numerically breakdown the pieces which need improvement. How do you do this? We use code profilers! In this episode we dive into the world of tweaking code performance and getting the most out of the hardware its running on.

Mono repos is not a new concept - but one often visited by growing organisations to help reduce the overhead of managing thoses dozens of repos in the company. Is it better? Well that depends on the company and how they work. In this episode I go through the differences and reasons why one would consider a mono repo over a multi repo.

Now a days even a simple CRUD based app can have a lot of moving parts - esp if deployed with something like Kubernetes. Our complex applications are growing even faster, interacting with many different libraries and handling greater and more variable loads. How do we get insight into whats really happening on the code level any more? Long gone are the days when a simple CPU usage alert would be enough to monitor most applications - today we need to monitor on different level and metrics to get a better picture of whats going on. This and more in this episode.