Grokking the Tech Career

Knowing a good architecture is useful. Learning to produce one when the answer disappears matters more.

Preparing for a Twitter Software Engineering Interview? Learn how to approach coding, System Design, timelines, scale, and technical depth.

One of the easiest ways to overestimate a piece of software is to evaluate it on the day it is written. The tests pass. The implementation is reasonably clean. Everyone agrees the requirement has been satisfied, and the code moves into the repository with that brief, wonderful feeling that the problem has been solved. Then six months pass and somebody asks for another permission type, another wor…

When engineers prepare for recognizable technology companies, I often see them prepare for the company before they prepare for the job.

When I watch engineers prepare for a Big Tech interview, I often see the same preparation system emerge.

The Meta software engineering interview is easier to prepare for once you stop treating it like one giant test

The Netflix software engineering interview questions I'd practice if I were interviewing today

The Apple software engineering interview questions I'd prepare for if interviewing today

For decades, product managers operated within a relatively stable world. Their job was to understand customer problems, identify worthwhile opportunities, align engineering efforts, and make thoughtful tradeoffs between competing priorities. Success depended on building products that solved real problems while balancing technical complexity, business goals, and user experience. Generative AI intr…

The Anthropic Research Engineer Isn’t Chasing Breakthroughs. They’re Building the Environment Where Breakthroughs Become More Likely.

The Anthropic Data Engineer Isn’t Just Building Pipelines. They’re Building Evidence.

The Most Interesting Thing About the OpenAI Data Engineer Interview Has Very Little to Do With SQL

The more I thought about OpenAI’s hiring philosophy, the less I viewed it as a guide for passing one company’s interview.

When people imagine machine learning engineers at OpenAI, they usually picture researchers inventing entirely new neural network architectures.

Why the Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Says More About Modern Engineering Than Anthropic

The goal is to help you create diagrams that communicate the right ideas, defend the right decisions, and make complex systems easier to reason about together.

If you’ve been building software for a while, you’ve probably experienced this at least once. A project starts with what sounds like a simple request. “We just need users to upload files.” Or “Can we add a notification system?” Everyone leaves the kickoff meeting feeling like they understand the problem, so the team starts designing APIs, discussing databases, and estimating tickets. Then, a few …

Every social media app makes a news feed look effortless. You open the app, refresh the page, and within a fraction of a second hundreds of new posts appear in an order that feels surprisingly relevant. Behind that seemingly simple experience is one of the most demanding distributed systems engineers build. A News Feed system design has to absorb massive write spikes, serve millions of low-latenc…

Most engineers preparing for a System Design interview spend months studying. Oddly enough, many of them spend those months preparing for the wrong thing. They memorize Netflix or sketch Dropbox from memory. They watch YouTube videos explaining URL shorteners for the fifteenth time, or they collect PDFs, bookmark engineering blogs, and convince themselves that one more course will finally make ev…

Distributed file storage makes familiar file operations survive hardware and network failures by spreading responsibility across multiple machines. The user-visible result shows up as durability when data stays intact after failures, availability when reads and writes still succeed, consistency when different clients see the same contents and names, and latency when operations complete quickly en…