02 Jun 2021

One on one

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  • Define and agree on the purpose of the one on one
  • Define the topics to be discussed prior to meeting
  • Track and update metrics that you care about every time you meet
    • e.g., Predictability, Ownership, Purpose, Progress, Belonging
  • Discuss the status of those metrics if necessary
  • Write in a shared document (between the two of you) what is discussed
  • If any action items are defined during those meetings, use a task tracking system to keep each other accountable
    • Always define a deadline on tasks to indicate when the task should be revisited
  • Avoid using one on one for status updates

01 May 2021

Answering coding interview questions

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  • Read the problem statement
  • Look at any provided unit tests
  • Add any unit tests you think might be relevant and not currently covered
  • Order the unit tests from easiest to hardest
  • Ask questions to confirm your understanding of the problem and verify edge cases
  • Think of a possible approach to solve the problem
  • Share your approach with the interviewers and get their buy-in
    • You may do this by writing pseudo-code as you are explaining your thought process
  • Implement your solution
    • If you encounter any difficulties, state them and explain what you are thinking
    • Make use of preconditions/early exit if possible to handle empty cases
  • Run your code frequently, even if it is not fully working
  • Discuss any follow-up questions with the interviewers
21 Apr 2021

Managing your reading

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The process described below attempts to optimize reading quality books and enjoying the reading experience. As such, it promotes book exploration (discovery of new books) and reading books which have a high rating according to your own taste. Books which receive lower ratings (compared to other books) are moved down the reading priority list and will not be read until books that have higher priority (i.e., rating) either are finished reading or their rating decreases such that other books are now high priority.

  • Pick highly read books (use a site like goodreads to identify those books).
  • When reading a book, record the page you start and stop reading on, the time you start and stop reading and emit a rating for what you've read.
    • You can decide to optimize whether you want to optimize per page rating or per duration rating, that is, get the most value per page or by time spent reading.
  • Add new books to your reading list regularly. Those books are considered as having the highest priority and are then added to the prioritized list of books according to its rating.
  • When not reading a new book, read the books in order of priority and by interest at the time of reading.
  • From time to time you may look at your list of prioritized books and decide whether the books with the lowest priority should ever be finished. In some cases it is reasonable to decide that certain books will never be read completely.
  • As an alternative approach, one can use multi-armed bandits algorithms to decide which book to read next. Given that we can convert multi-armed bandits problem into the problem of selecting which book to read next given a sequence of readings and associated rating ("rewards"), the various algorithms (such as Epsilon-greedy or UCB1) will provide us with the next book we should read.
    • Interestingly enough, an algorithm like UCB1 will promote reading books we've never read first over reading books we've already started reading.

  1. Read partially any book for which you haven't given any rating
  2. Rate what you have read on a 1 to 5 scale, 1 being very bad and 5 being very good (see book rating)
  3. Compute the weighted rating of the book (the sum of rating times # of page associated to the reading divided by the total # of pages read so far for the book)
  4. Sort books by weighted rating (descending), then average estimated amount of time left to complete (ascending)
  5. If you have books that you haven't read yet, go back to the first step. If not, then pick the book at the top of the list computed in the previous step, then continue from step 2

  • It's better to read a good book than to finish a bad book

The onboarding process described here is specific to a software engineer joining a tech company. While some/most of the items may still apply to any job where you mainly work from a computer, the assumption will be that you develop software as an individual contributor.

  • Setup laptop
  • Access to slack
  • Access to zoom
  • Setup calendar reminders
  • Initial meeting with buddy
  • Access to git central repository
  • Installation of development tools/languages
  • Request software licenses
  • Access to CI/CD
  • Find where task management is done
  • Find the documentation to build projects
  • Connect 1 on 1 with each member of the team
  • Meet with manager 1 on 1
  • Define a 30-60-90 days plan with manager
  • Verify access to various systems (SSO, code repository, insurance company, payroll company, etc.)
  • End of week meeting with buddy

  • Setup and run the one step build process
  • Determine how are features/tasks prioritized, who prioritizes features/tasks
  • Review the team documentation
  • Review team practices/processes documentation (code style, code review, standups, planning, retrospective, demos)
  • Review common vocabulary, terminology, glossary documents
  • First PR + code review
  • Review the career ladder of the position

  • Review user definition, use cases, requirements
  • Read prior team meetings notes

  • Identify how deployments are done
  • Review the team roadmap
  • Determine where I can have the biggest impact
  • Determine a timeline where I'll have reached my 80/20 at the company
  • Determine the maturity of existing projects
  • Determine how fast can we iterate on certain aspects given the team/company composition
  • Identify the core/principal/staff contributors and their contributions
  • Review the architecture of the system
  • Review the database architecture
  • Learn about "how we got to this point"
  • Determine whether the product is a monolith or micro-services
  • Identify which (3rd party) tools are used by the team/company
  • Determine the portfolio of STARS situations of the team/company
  • Determine a rough estimate of the number of people in the different organizations
  • Connect 1 on 1 with important collaborator in other teams
  • End of first month meeting with buddy
  • First month performance review with manager
  • Informal 360-degree review with manager and peers on adaptation
  • Month 1 job satisfaction review

  • Team interaction diagram
  • Month 2 job satisfaction review

  • Month 3 job satisfaction review
15 Nov 2020

Habits

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habits
  • Decide what habit you want to have and record why you want this habit
  • Start with the smallest amount of effort possible
  • Increase the amount of effort regularly until you reach the desired amount of regular effort
  • Track your habit in a habit recording system such as Loop Habit Tracker
  • Review on a regular basis (monthly) whether you want to keep this habit or not
    • If you decide not to keep the habit, record why you decided to drop the habit such that if you decide to pick it up again, you can determine whether you might end up dropping it again.
  • It's not a problem if you miss doing your habit, just make sure to do it when you're supposed to

  • Daily planning
  • Daily review
  • Eat/Drink
  • Shower
  • Wash dishes
  • Cook
  • Exercise
  • Read
  • Watch TV shows
  • Floss
  • Brush teeth

  • Weekly planning
  • Weekly review
  • Wash clothes
  • Clean apartment
  • Buy groceries

  • Monthly planning
  • Monthly review
  • Pay bills

  • Yearly planning
  • Year review

  • Daily planning at 10 am
  • Weekly planning on Mondays
  • Monthly planning on the first of the month
  • Pay credit card on the first of the month

  • Google Keep
  • Google Calendar
  • Google Mail
  • Slack
  • Daylio
  • Notion