Sorry forgot to reply!

Not really I was just sleeping

Hey ya’ll!

I was on a bit of a social media hiatus recently due to wedding stress, work stress, and *gestures vaguely at the world* but I’m slowly making my way back! Thank you for your patience!

Emily Kager @EmilyKager

Tag the @Meow at your company

Context Matters

Context is so important. Why did we do something that way? What else did we try? What were the original constraints? But we all know engineers are notoriously bad at documenting, especially our failures or misses. One thing I miss about open source culture when going to a different big tech culture is the sometimes YEARS of documentation in bugs all oversharing what we’ve tried, why it didn’t work, what we might be blocked on, and some more ideas we might have for the future. It made it much less painful when someone left, and even helped my future self understand something I did 2 weeks ago.

When I shared this snark this week, people commented it’s the sign of an unhealthy company to lose these knowledgable engineers, but I would argue the worse sign is that we still store the most valuable things we have - institutional knowledge - in someone’s brain with an average tenure of ~2 years.

Anyway unrelated I heard from peers this tweet was popular at several Big Tech Cos 😌

Emily Kager @EmilyKager

the hardest part of software engineering is finding someone who 1. knows why we did that 2. still works at the company 3. is not on PTO / sabbatical

ICYMI

It’s true. Entire workflows are built around what worked 7 years ago.

protected concerted activity enthusiast @BlueSpaceCanary

Programmers imprint like baby birds on whatever editor happens to be the first one they use with a remotely reasonable configuration

Not likely - not even God could understand the ins and outs of Jira.

Madison Campbell @martyrdison

do you think god used jira to create the universe in 7 days that’s a really fast sprint

I’m a huge fan of humbling Harvard grads but I also think Waterloo grads need to chill TF out.

Katz 🌌 @0xkatz

Reviewing resumes is fun!