Reflections

Most people have seen Steve Ballmer dance about developers developers developers! If you haven’t you absolutely should. Ballmer might have had an interesting way of going about it, but if you are a tech company, you need that enthusiasm for your developers. Sure he may have been talking about external developers, but I firmly believe that feeling should apply to developers at your company too! When you are a small company it might be as simple as part of one of your engineer’s time, and at a larger place it might be a dedicated team, but one thing remains true, you need to give your engineers the right tools to be productive....

I used to be one of those people who jumped jobs once every ~2 years. I’ve now been at Bolt for about 2.5 years, and a few close friends asked me if I was okay given I haven’t switched jobs yet 😂. I was amused, but the truth is, I am actually so happy right now and there has been absolutely no reason to look for a change! One of the things I’ve talked to a lot of engineers about recently is what I look for in my job....

As an org if you use CircleCI, over time you will notice that config file really increase in length. One of the repos I worked on hit ~3000 lines. It starts becoming unwieldy, reviewing changes is hard and making changes is harder still. Sadly CircleCI doesn’t support reading from multiple files. But do not fret, this blog post will show you how you can do this. Turns out Circle built most of what is required, into their CLI....

Recently we were working on migrating our backend repo to use go modules. Now given the size of our repo this was a huge change that involved changing almost every .go file in the repo. We managed to make this change in a safe manner keeping master green and this post explains how we did this using Github and CircleCI. The hard part of changes like this are mostly around communication....

I work at Spoke and we have a great QA team. Once when I asked angad from our QA team how things were looking, his reply was “there aren’t any issues yet.” One morning our QA team pinged us to let us know that our credit card forms didn’t work on IE. We use Stripe Elements for our billing purposes. Stripe Elements works in a very interesting way, you create an empty div where you want the credit card input to show up, and Stripe does all the heavy lifting by inserting an iframe which accepts the credit card info and returns an opaque token, which cannot be used to reconstruct the credit card data....

A colleague ordered the OnHub and I got a chance to mess around with it. I was disappointed. What I expected was a device that makes WiFi very simple, and yet has power features. It is definitely one step in the right direction but has quite a way to go. The internet is scattered with reviews about the OnHub and what it does and how it does them (Wired, The Verge)....

I recently enabled cross posting of my tweets to my Facebook profile. This was pretty awesome for the most part, reach two sets of my audiences with one post. Less work and a neat solution you got me. However a couple of days ago I saw myself tweeting quite a bit, and that was when I realized I was spamming the my friend’s Facebook timelines. I have just over a 1000 friends on Facebook and I am spamming all of them with content when I most my posts are targeted only at a specific group....