Articles

Software engineering lessons from production, raw and honest from the heart — almost 20 years of them. Jump to a year in the sidebar, or browse categories and curated collections.

6 articles from March 2022 · show all

Adding categories to a Gatsby blog (for better SEO)

One of my biggest frustrations since migrating swizec.com from Wordpress to Gatsby was that I never added categories. Always wanted to, never did. Thought it would be super hard. Gatsby made it painless

Saving time in UTC doesn't work and offsets aren't enough

Lessons from a painful outage with timezones, UTC offsets, and database clients that took a whole week to resolve.

A quick lesson in writing resilient code

On the backend anything can and will fail. How do you deal with that?

Are you the engineer who scoffs at high salary numbers?

Engineering compensation falls into groups so different that neither group even realizes the others exist. And they fight about it.

Why experts charge more

Ever noticed how an expert's job isn't that different from an apprentice's? Yet they can charge way more 🤔

How to give and receive feedback

Feedback can save an airplane from crashing, or upset everyone around you. But for you personally, honest feedback is the fastest way to become a better engineer. Fixing what you're bad at is where the gains hide.