To try and avoid having interview candidate start every interview with the same "tell me your background" boilerplate, we get every interviewer in the room with the candidate at the beginning of the interview for a few minutes, so everyone can introduce themselves and the candidate can walk through their background. Recently we had a […]
#improvement
7 posts
23 Sept 2015
31 Aug 2015
Okay! You had an idea for how to improve the project, the maintainers indicated they'd approve it, you checked out a new branch, made some changes, and you are ready to submit it for review. Here are some tips for submitting a changeset that's more likely to pass through code review quickly, and make it […]
13 Aug 2013
Yesterday I sped up our unit/integration test runs from 16 minutes to 3 minutes. I thought I'd share the techniques I used during this process. We had a hunch that an un-mocked network call was taking 3 seconds to time out. I patched this call throughout the test code base. It turns out this did […]
1 Jun 2013
I really enjoyed Sam Saffron's post about eliminating trivial inconveniences in his development process. This resonated with me as I tend to get really distracted by minor hiccups in the development process (page reload taking >2 seconds, switch to a new tab, etc). I took a look at my development process and found a few […]
28 Mar 2013
This American Life is an excellent podcast, but occasionally puts out episodes on subjects I don't care for - fiction, reminisces about home life, etc. There is one heuristic you should use for filtering American Life podcasts: listen to the podcasts they release that tell one story for the whole hour. Example whole-hour podcasts, that […]
12 Feb 2013
If you've ever tried to teach someone HTML, you know how hard it is to get the syntax right. It's a perfect storm of awfulness. Newbies have to learn all of the syntax, in addition to the names of HTML elements. They don't have the pattern matching skills (yet) to notice when their XML is […]
8 Nov 2012
Last week two other Twilio engineers and I went to the Columbia engineering career fair. We had a great time and talked to a lot of really smart people. However I was surprised at some of the naive mistakes students made when we were talking. We're there to try to hire students and students are […]