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Everything I know about good API design
Most of what modern software engineers do involves APIs: public interfaces for communicating with a program, like this one from Twilio. I’ve spent a lot of time…
Sean Goedecke
Sean Goedecke's personal blog
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2
Seeing like a software company
The big idea of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State can be expressed in three points: Modern organizations exert control by maximising “legibility”: by…
3
How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
Many software engineers are fatalistic about company politics. They believe that it’s pointless to get involved, because: Technical decisions are often made for…
4
Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
How tech companies make money and why it's important
5
Getting things “done” in large tech companies
What does it mean to get things done? In the abstract, you can complete a mathematical proof or a problem set, but the real world is much fuzzier. Suppose I…
6
The good times in tech are over
For most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were almost unheard of…
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The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of…
8
Three kinds of AI products work
The very first LLM-based product, ChatGPT, was just the ability to talk with the model itself: in other words, a pure chatbot. This is still the most popular…
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Ratchet effects determine engineer reputation at large companies
Why you can't skip to the top (but you can skip to the bottom)