2. They can write code all-day — “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” — Robert Frost, The road not taken There comes a moment in every engineer’s career where the question looms large. Do you want to tread the path of Staff…

Maintain the child-like curiosity and open-mindedness that kept you wide awake at night during your early days as a developer — There have been reams of prose written on why an engineering manager needs to be hands-on. I think an equal number of pages have been written about why he does not. Needless to say, there are pros and cons to each. When I first took over as a lead of…

The world as we know it, irrevocably shifted on its’ axis a couple of years ago. When we first heard we were going to work from home ‘till this thing tides over’, I was working in the same company for 7 years. I was completely familiar with the tools and…

The what, why and how of it — What is it Psychological safety is a term which is used to denote the ability of a team member to take risks within the team while being vulnerable in front of his team members. …

A little over a year ago, the Engineering team at Independer was at a curious cross roads. We had grown rapidly over the last few years from 3 to 6+ scrum teams while keeping the same monolithic architecture alive. We were releasing twice a week to production but they were…

I turn Forty-one years old today. Forty-one is a strange age for reflection. It is not forty where life purportedly begins. It is not, say, forty two where you supposedly have the answer to everything. …

Four mistakes to avoid So you have been writing code for a while. You are a decent communicator and as you rise through the seniority levels in the team, you find yourself taking more and more responsibility to talk to different stakeholders, defining the technical vision of the product while balancing it out with…

To paraphrase the famous song from the movie ‘Sound of Music’ where the kind nuns throw out this rather perplexing and inexplicably difficult question into the cosmos. Discussions of technical debt can be just as perplexing and unfathomable within organizations, creating deep divisions between the ‘techies’ and ‘business’. What is Technical Debt? Let me…

What happens when you put a few teams of terrific developers, a definite objective with some vague goalposts and a deadline? Why, an Independer Hackweek, of course! Independer has witnessed terrific growth and our engineering team is constantly on the lookout for better and faster ways to ship our features…