Deep Work by Cal Newport

I have always been interested in how to do more meaningful work, and get better and better at what I do. This quest sees me read content which is sometimes technical in nature and sometimes talks about how to be a better leader [1, 2]. Sometimes I go a little meta and read about work … Continue reading Deep Work by Cal Newport →

Don’t be the Alpha Geek: Your team deserves better

Alpha Geek? I recently came across the term “Alpha Geek” in “The Manager’s Path”. The Alpha geek is usually an excellent, effective engineer who is driven to always have the right answers, and solve hard problems. Alrighty! I want to be one! Where do I sign up? He knows exactly why that thing you’re trying … Continue reading Don’t be the Alpha Geek: Your team deserves better →

How I stopped being awful at managing: Leadership lessons from a Dev

At Squad, we have been following the concept of having small inter-disciplinary teams, which we call Solver Teams (the concept is beautifully explained by Spotify, we took a lot of inspiration from them). As fate would have it, I got to lead a team responsible for building the Machine Learning platform for Squad, from scratch. … Continue reading How I stopped being awful at managing: Leadership lessons from a Dev →

Configure Postgres statement_timeout from within Django

“A close-up of white dials on a music mixer” by Alexey Ruban on Unsplash In a bid to prepare ourselves for projected growth, we are at the moment trying to figure out what part of our system will break at what scale, and how. One step towards this was to also define strict timeouts for … Continue reading Configure Postgres statement_timeout from within Django →

Custom Sentry Client for more freedom: How to ignore any exception you want

We use Sentry for our error reporting, and we love it. It is simple, gives options for a lot of different use cases, and can easily be integrated with Django, over which our backend is built. We recently fixed (or ignored :P) an issue we had for a long time. This article is about how … Continue reading Custom Sentry Client for more freedom: How to ignore any exception you want →

Two years with Celery in Production: Bug Fix Edition

Photo by Martin Oslic on Unsplash As mentioned in an earlier post, we rely on Celery for publishing and consuming tasks to/from our RabbitMQ (RMQ) broker. We are very happy with the whole setup and it works reliably for us. But this wasn’t exactly the case up until four weeks back. We were plagued with … Continue reading Two years with Celery in Production: Bug Fix Edition →