The concept of a 10x engineer is deceptive. You have engineers that are excited and driven to build things. Or they’re not. A while ago, I realized I’m a true product engineer. Product engineers are happiest when building something tangible that directly impacts customers. …

There are a number of great examples of useContext out there. I’ll keep this one simple. I was recently working on a feature we are bombarding with analytics. I cared about what page component any given action was taken place in. Initially, props were being used to pass a pageName…

Note: It took me a while to wrap my head around the GraphQL Connection arguments used for pagination. These are basically notes of some of my conclusions afterwards. These are the four arguments for a GraphQL Connection: first: Int after: String last: Int before: String Both after and before represent…

When I first joined my current company (Gusto), I was surprised at their Github approval policy. As long as you had a single pull request approval, you could push additional changes and merge to the main branch without needing another approval. At previous companies I’d worked, re-approval for new changes…

Frequently in my career, my manager and I have received flak because I work ‘too much.’ The tech industry is terrified of burnout (with good reason). And it’s true, I’ll work seven days a week if I have the time. However, in reality I spend less time working than most…

“Use technologies and frameworks that you know” is one of my values in Practices to rapidly ship new software products as an engineer. Engineers love to learn. We love to explore new ideas and tools that we haven’t encountered before. …

Throughout my tenure as an engineer, people always seem surprised at how quickly my teams have been able to ship new products. I’ve noticed a number of consistent patterns that work. I’ve broken them into 4 categories: engineering practices, working with partners and stakeholders, engineering team skills, and individual skills…

Over the past ~8 months, I’ve been working on Pet Story, a mobile app that allows pet caregivers to generate a Facebook-like feed for their clients. We applied to the Y Combinator (summer 2019) and were invited for an interview. We unfortunately were not accepted, but it was an insightful…

Note: this is just the raw application that we submitted to Y Combinator for the Summer 2019 cohort. We were accepted for an interview. Actual discussion can be found in the following blog post. Company name: Pet Story Company url, if any: https://petstory.app If you have a demo, what’s the…