Ben Halperin

Friendly reminder that if you Typescript, your types are a lie. No type checking at runtime. If you call an external system there is ZERO guarantee on type accuracy. You STILL need some form of contract checking at runtime. I use jo for all incoming and outgoing data.

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I am hiring Sr. React Engineers. You and I are a fit, except there are just a couple of things I need from you. Before that, let me establish that I can read your mind, and what I can offer will make your problems go away! Your current job may have no impact, but Boosted offers challenging assignments. You hate your job in a toxic culture (who doesn’t?). We offer you a highly collaborative environment. You feel your career has stagnated, but we offer continuous growth and career development programs. You feel left out in your current job, whereas Boosted ensures engineers are part of planning, architecture, and technical roadmapping. The rest you can see for yourself in the diagram below (which I created with love and took my time to make for you). There are only three things I am looking for in you: React expertise, a growth mindset, and excellent communication. I will drop a link to the JD in the comments.

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Agents are all the hype right now, especially with OpenAI's GPT-4o announcement last week. While I'm excited about them, too, there's been an overhype cycle happening, and I hope there's no major implosion as a result. The hype comes from the fact that while agents can be very powerful and seemingly magical in a number of use cases, it takes nontrivial effort to establish these use cases. What's especially exciting is that as more of these use cases are proven, there will be ever more reuse in the various pieces needed for these agent networks. To that effect, I'm very excited to be at the forefront of this developing area, as there will be compounding benefits for starting early! Sentitrac is definitely starting early here, and you might be surprised as to the first use case: having an agent control a Mac Mini we use as a server to perform specific operations we don't perform in the cloud! So far, these actions have been scheduled, and maintenance has been relatively manual. However, having an agent on the machine that can respond to messages (sent from potentially another agent!) in its queue will enable the automation of actions I've otherwise been doing manually. You might be thinking: why do you even run a Mac Mini at your home for Sentitrac? Well, that'll be a story for another time; perhaps an agent will be able to answer that soon 😉

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Hot take : there’s no such thing as a 10x dev or engineer.  There are juniors and seniors. There are people who work faster or slower. If someone on your team is producing 10x what someone else is producing, it’s either poor quality or you have someone massively underproducing. 

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Working in massive tech debt is like swimming in a tar pit. Juniors will say “we’re going too fast!” And what they mean is we’re pouring more tar into the pit. We can’t deliver without cutting corners. Seniors will say “we’re going too slow!” And what they mean is we could get so much more done if we weren’t wading through a tar pit. Things used to be so much better. Managers will say the two statements cancel each other out, and keep things as-is. They’ll congratulate the fastest swimmer in the tar pit because they don’t remember what it feels like to swim through water. Leaders will question: why do we keep trying to swim through a tar pit? Then they'll do something to change it. If it’s early enough, *maybe* you can reverse the tar-ification. Let it sit for too long, and chances are you’ll have to do the painful work of pulling out of the tar pit altogether. What’s been your tar pit? How did you fix it?

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Imposter Syndrome doesn't magically disappear forever. I'm well past my twenties now and a decent way into my career. I've been managing engineering teams for over a decade. But imposter Syndrome still shows up. I was having a review about my first paid course that I released to the public. There was lots of feedback for me. And if you're like me, the thought of getting feedback is both scary as hell but powerful. It's like this mixed fear of dread and opportunity because you know you'll be able to improve. So I get the feedback... And it's all super actionable. Mostly technical things that can be tweaked and easily improved. But partially out of fear and partially because my Imposter Syndrome was running high I had to ask: "But... was the teaching style okay? Did anyone complain about it being bad?" I've been doing some form of tutoring or teaching since I was 14. That's over 20 years of my life (yikes, that sucks to write). I've even recently volunteered at a high school to help with computer science. I should feel CONFIDENT teaching concepts. But here I am, an imposter. Am I good enough? Did people hate me? Do I even know what I'm talking about? Why did I ever sign up for this? I'm embarrassed now. All thoughts that were running through my head waiting for feedback. "No! I haven't heard anything like that. I think the teaching style was on point." (not a direct quote but paraphrased) ... and in the moment I get a bit of relief from external validation. But we always need to keep pushing the self doubt out of our minds. I share Imposter Syndrome scenarios because I find my imposter syndrome subsides more when I hear that other people go through it as well. I hope this helped you realize you're not alone when these thoughts creep up. ---- 📨 Sign up for my email newsletter! 🗣️ Share with your network! #ImposterSyndrome #ImpostorSyndrome

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How do you work through feeling overwhelmed with projects, both at work and at home? My project list is never ending. I have multiple major work areas, a house with a sheet of improvement projects that keeps growing, half a dozen trips planned into next year, and a wife and two daughters with lists of their own. It's easy to not know where to start or what to do next. And then before you know it you've burned an entire day playing sudoku. Many years ago I learned the art of Getting Things Done. I even wrote an article on it for USENIX Association's ;login: Magazine just as the world came screeching to a halt in early 2020, and talked about it on The Hedge Podcast (episode 88). There is a lot of structure to GTD, but I can boil it down to having a trusted list of all the next actions I need to do. One that is reviewed regularly and captures thoughts as I have them. All of it - work, home, family - gets treated the same way in one place. I've been out of practice and I've recently rekindled my system. This is one of the ways I'm addressing feeling adrift. I can always find something to do that will move me forwards, as well as give me that dopamine hit of crossing a task off my list. And if I'm avoiding one it's probably because I didn't break the next action down to a small enough chunk. The most important part of practicing GTD (and other organizational systems) is that it clears my head. The human brain isn't really great at maintaining lists. The only real method it has for doing this is to constantly go over the list, which keeps the pathways in the brain fresh. That takes mental capacity, whether you realize it or not, and it adds to your stress. Plus, half the time you don't even have the list in mind or complete when it needs to be. You think about the dead batteries in the flashlight when the power goes out at home, not when you're standing in Home Depot wondering what else you need to get.

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This week I’ve had several of the developers on my team ask me about taking vacation. As a relatively new manager, I hate when my developers ask me if they can take vacation. I’ve got stuff to get done, don’t waste my time asking me to take vacation when PTO is one of your benefits. You don’t ask me to use your insurance or spend your pay check. I’ve told each of them, just let me and your project leads know, as far in advance as possible, that you’re going to be gone. Note: “Waste my time” is not how I feel at all but I am trying to drive the idea that PTO isn’t something they have to earn twice. I don’t ever want one of my developers to feel hesitant letting me know they will be taking time off. #managertalk #benefits #vacation #PTO #leadership #valueemployees

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It's been a couple weeks since I stepped into the role of Engineering Manager. At my company its a hybrid role - the goal is 50% managing the team, 50% coding/building. Now that I've had a couple weeks doing both its clear - coding is easier than managing 😂 #softwareengineering #leadership

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Software Engineering Joys: One of my favorite things as I’ve grown in my career is the ability to jump between programming languages as I find them suitable for the current task. At my old gig, I would often go back and forth between Python, Go, and SQL. It was fun because they felt different. We used Python for a lot of our production code, and I used Go for personal tools. I loved the power and simplicity of Go, and I like hacking data pipelines in Python. I also love its ability to prototype. Currently, I’ve spent the majority of my time over the last two days in Python and Bash, and I find it so cool how quickly I’m able to iterate and script in these languages. Having spent two days in these languages, I miss C++! I miss the power and expressiveness of it. I love the fact that adding debugging symbols can make the program too slow to keep up with data. I’m amazed at how quickly data can move through the GPU. It’s an awesome language with access to so much! Each of these languages has taught me something different, and I find the variety and pace of each refreshing when I haven’t worked with them in awhile. If you are still learning your first language, that’s great! Keep it up! If you are considering learning a second language, do it. That was the one that felt like it unlocked the door for me. After I learned two I knew I could work with any. Keep at it, and be thankful people have dedicated so much time to making it enjoyable for us to solve (create?) problems on computers. If you like my content, feel free to follow or connect! #softwareengineering #languages

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The vast majority of content on software engineering I see out there is tailored towards teams that are already high-performing. This makes sense for a few different reasons: high-performers generally write these articles so they write what they know, it's fun and exciting to talk about the latest and greatest, etc. However most teams have a ton of low-hanging fruit that they can address to dramatically improve team performance with low effort lifts. It's very hard to tune an F1 car to go just a bit faster but the simple fact is that most engineering teams are like a commuter car... just by taking a few minutes to put air in the tires you can see dramatic handling and mileage improvements on the daily commute. What are some easier goals to aim for to improve a struggling engineering team? In no particular order: * How big is the average MR/PR? In general a 1,000 line MR/PR isn't four times harder to review than a 250 line MR/PR, it's much much harder. Several thousand line MRs/PRs dropped every few weeks across a team cause lots of issues including merge conflicts and taking a long time to review. After discussing with Product, can tickets be smaller so that merges aren't so big? * How long on average does an MR/PR stay outstanding before getting merged? The older an MR/PR is at merge time the higher the chance of merge conflicts and merge conflicts are a way to generate work but deliver no value to the end user. MRs/PRs that take a long time to merge could be indicative of the team not correctly accounting for the time it takes to review. Should tickets have bigger estimates? * If you're running sprints (and if you're on an underperforming team I recommend switching to sprints ASAP as they bring into focus these types of issues), how often do you have carry-over and how big is it? Improving these estimates is not just an exercise in accounting. A team that estimates work well is one that is not rushed, performant, reviews well, and has time to think about the highest priority tech debt. But most importantly a team that estimates work well is one that delivers on their promises. You may be on a team where these goals have already been achieved or never were an issue in the first place. That's great! But if your engineering team has been underperforming these could be some of the best places to first look. What's some low hanging fruit that you've seen on engineering teams that when addressed had the biggest impact?

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I heard a software engineer quit and say “I don’t respect my PM, what do they even do”. As someone who’s done both, I’ll tell you why PM is not as easy as you think. Asking “Do PMs do anything?” is the equivalent of asking “Why do you need 5000 engineers for a social media app?” For a social media app, there’s a lot of front end code complexity, back end services to manage, and infrastructure to maintain at scale. For a PM job, there’s a lot of communication complexity, hard prioritization decisions, and deeply understanding your users. At the end of the day, PMs may not have hard technical skills, like coding, but they have a lot of “soft skills” like storytelling, influencing, leading, and empathizing. For example, with storytelling, it’s easy to say “We should build a meal delivery service that is healthy and cheap” Well duh, everyone likes cheaper and everyone likes healthier. The “pitch” lacks product differentiation and is not compelling. But a good PM would tell a different story. “More millennials are busier than ever, making more money, but are living unhealthy lives. When we look at Whole foods sales data and talk to customers, we know they want healthy food options. But they don’t have time to prepare healthy meals and the best options, like Sweetgreens, are too far away or have too long of a line at lunch. We should build a premium meal delivery service that focuses on freshly delivered healthy meals that users can schedule for specific times!” A good PM paints a story of (1) what niche customer they’re focused on, (2) talks to users and looks at data, (3) identifies a hair on fire problem, and (4) prioritizes what matters (and doesn’t matter, like cost). From my experience, most engineers don’t appreciate how time consuming it is to talk to users, how painful it is to make prioritization decisions, and how difficult it is to tell a compelling story.

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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.

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"HR is not your friend" is a phrase most of us have heard of. There's some truth to that, but today I want to write a post about why I never say that phrase from the perspective of an engineering manager [Content warning: suicide]. Many engineers share the stereotype of being shy or introverted. I'm in this bucket. I personally don't know many of us that have had many interactions with HR. Our interactions with HR are usually along the lines of on-boarding, getting our benefits, and exit interviews. These are largely emotionally neutral activities. This means that when engineers do hear about something "HR", it's usually a big negative scandal that skews the perspective of the department. Engineers don't often hear about the positive things that HR does. Basically, I'm saying there's a sampling bias. What I do know is a lot of people struggling with some form of mental illness or a health condition. I recently read a cautionary tale that went like this: * Growing business wanted to save costs, so they hired contractors. * To save costs, the company has minimal resources allocated to the HR department. Only full-time employees have HR processes in places, not contractors. * Everything goes well for months. Years even. Output was great. Full-time employees love the contractor. Everybody thinks they are geniuses. * Contractor goes silent. That's odd. * Because there's no HR processes in place, the engineering team finds out via a support ticket from the contractor's spouse that he committed suicide. * Everyone on the team is traumatized. Nobody wants to work anymore. I mean, how do you even cope with that? It's absolutely awful. My point is that I don't say the phrase "HR is not your friend" because a work environment without HR sounds terrible. I get what is meant by that phrase, but I prefer to focus my energy on influencing the work culture instead. Things are more in your control than you probably think. If you want to read the article, I highly recommend it. Please remember to support each other. https://lnkd.in/gBDQBWdu #engineeringmanagement #softwareengineering

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Here's a LinkedIn Premium feature I'd gladly buy: The ability to have a map of people that I want to visit when traveling, users can submit requests as part of connections. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a city and forgot someone I wanted to meet lives there. Yes, this will be coopted by sales for canvassing. And yes, Map Anything would also probably do the same thing. But, I'm thinking of a frictionless experience where I can see points on a map of people. Not their address of course. Bonus? The ability to set yourself as traveling to a different city and the option to alert people that you'll be around. What do you think? Is this something, or just a solution for one? #linkedin #productideas #networking #businesssystems

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Most of the time requirements are figured out and given to you upfront. ... as a more junior software engineer. And this is generally the case because you're being onboarded and ramped up on the team. The goal is to get you familiarized with things so you can get in the groove of delivering effectively. As you become more senior, there's more and more unknowns. In fact, it's a VERY important skill to be able to try answering a lot of the unknowns and figuring out constraints. You might hear what a given goal or target is, but you'll need to explore and understand what the constraints are for achieving it before blasting out code on your computer. 👇Link to the full video in the comments. Comment below if it's not showing and I'll provide it!👇 ---- 📨 Sign up for my email newsletter 🗣️ Share with your network #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareEngineer

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I've been thinking about the challenge of preserving the "low priority voice" as software products scale. As teams and projects grow, folks outside of development and product positions seem to get more and more quiet—or maybe they're just harder to hear. Sure, a typo here, some inconsistent spelling there; these don't really rise to the level of "bugs" since nothing's technically broken. But when these little things accumulate, they can start to chip away at the users' trust in the product and the company. Curious to know, how are others tackling this within their teams? #SoftwareDevelopment #TeamCollaboration #QualityAssurance

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Yesterday someone said to me that the true Engineering Managers job description is: To enable really smart people to make them look good. I think in truth there is a bit more to it than that phrase. I like that they have included the word 'enable' and that they are highlighting really smart people. If I had to try and rewrite this in the same vain perhaps: To empower and enable really smart people to achieve business outcomes and deliver business value. How you empower and enable those is the art of Engineering Management.

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I've been hearing a lot about "the end of the Jr Developer" lately and how no one should take software engineering anymore. Sure, the market is a bit of a mess right now with lots of layoffs and a bias toward hiring senior developers but what happens in 10 years when those senior devs are retiring or moving into managerial roles? It's the same with anything, if you aren't training the next generation of developers you are heading for a crisis sooner rather than later. We are trading short term gains for long term pain. AI might be steering use towards another dotcom or crypto style bubble but software development isn't going anywhere and ChatGPT isn't going to take any of our jobs. #softwaredevelopment #ai #softwareengineer

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