It sounds like an oxymoron; give me a chance to explain. Like almost everybody who has ever worked in software development, I have had my fair share of bad technical interviews. Almost everybody agrees they are necessary. I say almost …
I was about five years old when my Uncle introduced me to trick questions. My earliest problem-solving memory was when he drew two lines of equal length in my notebook and asked me if I could make one line longer …
This blog post grew out of a presentation I made to Vena’s Product and Development team, during our Professional Development(PD) Days, in March 2022.
I have often struggled to think of things to present at PD Days or Lunch N’ …
The following note was shared with the company a few weeks ago, and today was shared publicly. I couldn’t be more excited about Vena’s future, we have something incredibly special here. Culturally, as a group, as a brand, we have …
Some time ago, one of our internal users reported a frustrating problem in our ETL job system. One of their jobs got stuck over the weekend, and all attempts to cancel …
Several years ago, I bought one of those Christmas trees with lights already strung up from a big box store. Every December, I go to the basement where it’s stored, dust it off, set it up in our living room, …
In a REST API system, what should the DELETE API return if the resource being deleted doesn’t exist: “200 OK” or “404 Not Found”? It seems like a minor design choice, but we had a surprisingly contentious debate over the …
A short while ago, we were building a distributed backend service where multiple instances of the service would be sending requests to each other to coordinate work splitting and availability. We were concerned about a number of potential roadblocks, including …
In Part 1 of this series, we showed how a solution to the puzzle could be represented simply by the sequence of 12 pieces in the order we place them, given an agreed upon strategy of where to place pieces. …
One morning, Grady walks into the office and leaves a couple of wooden puzzles on the shared table in the Data Management Team area. Many of us were nerd-sniped that day. This is a tale of how one single puzzle …
