I failed to build a relationship with a key contributor which led to a lot of frictions and slowed down my own growth. I worked in an engineering team. The team had an established senior engineer. My personal take on the engineer is that they were a) strongly opinionated, b)…

I could not query our service logs for attributes I was interested in and had to come up with a fast and creative solution to do it. I owned a Certificate Authority (CA) service with my team. The CA generated X509 certificates for clients. For simplicity, an X509 certificate was…

I think the most challenging decisions are the ones that affect other people. I had to say no to a person who wanted to join my team as a senior engineer. He took several tasks to check if he is up to the challenge. It was especially important because he…

My team provides X509 certificates for many use cases inside of the company network. One such use case is to use them for a sandboxed web service identity. Almost every company engineer uses these web services to test their changes to web sites and APIs in preproduction. The company has…

Once, when I just joined my last team I was looking through team members' tasks and code reviews to learn more about this team problem space. One day I noticed that an engineer made a code change to move a serial number generation from a distributed sequential counter to a…

I was attending a meeting. The meeting was between three leads of different engineering teams including me. All three leads worked on developing a new infrastructure solution. An objective of the meeting was to find a path forward on what response one of our APIs should return. Two of the…

During a performance evaluation, one peer provided no-data-to-evaluate feedback to one of my reports. They surprised me. What did I overlook? Let’s name the peer — Terra and my report — Ken. Ken is a young engineer. I prepared an individual project for Ken, for his growth. I also assigned…

I learnt about Dubai from pictures on internet fifteen years ago. Modern and luxurious architecture amazed me. I researched a little more about the place. I got surprised. It was a small tribal town only a century ago. My dream was to see the place one day with my own…

Yesterday I was scrolling through a feed of TED talks when one title struck me — “Can we create vaccines that mutate and spread?”. I was impressed by author’s perspective I never had in my mind. If it didn’t eureka you yet, let me explain what I mean. I was…