Four months back, I was contacted by a gaming software company for a senior developer position. The role was generic: It embraced all aspects of development: Back end, Mobile, and Cloud. The recruiter summed up the package: €150k annual salary (The salary part is €100k. However, in the EU, the…

My total Medium outreach is already past 1M readers. Here is a list of my most popular articles, sorted by view count: Why You Should Never Send Your CV via Gmail This story went viral on Medium right when the pandemic lockdowns shook the world. So far, it has netted 319K views, and 80% of it are Medium internal…

It’s the essence of my senior developer interview thought process. During pandemics, my 18-month long serial-rejection jinx led me to a deep soul-searching phase. I learned new skills-no results. I learned about STAR, but it wasn’t enough. Fully exploiting STAR to your advantage either requires lying a lot in the…

A developer preparing for an upcoming interview almost always starts with a Google search. She would first search the questions — technical ones. Inevitably, this will be an abyss that very few programmers can come out of. It goes on forever, until the dreaded interview day. There is no opportunity…

What followed was beyond my imagination I usually hate to outsource programming work. Yet, front-end development has been my Achilles’ heel. If the task is non-trivial, outsourcing is inevitable. That’s how I ended up posting the front end development job on Upwork. The task, the price, and the contract: The task was to make a single-page website…

Every time I think of writing as a career, I am amazed at its sheer potential and unique position among intellectual careers. At one end, it is capable of freeing you from the chains of 9–5, and all the baggage that comes along with it. Writing is an asynchronous activity…

Reflections on World Indie Bookstore Day — When I first went to the USA in 2003, I was awestruck by its civilian infrastructure. The town where I lived had a population of 70000. What I marveled at was the right mix of community places. Besides community hall and a weekly farmer’s market, there was a public library…

Don’t just aim to prevent extinction. Be weaponized. — Since the arrival of ChatGPT, my feed is split into two camps: Software development will be disrupted with generative AI. AI can’t write perfect code, so our jobs are safe. Both claims are extremist. At the same time, it wouldn’t be wrong to predict that a lot of coders will…

ChatGPT isn’t the ace card. OneDrive is. — I am just done watching the 36-minute-long demo of MS Copilot. I wasn’t quite impressed — not because I do not appreciate the Chat-based features of Copilot, but because I had already known that part before watching. However, one statement in that demo most resonated with me: We don’t need…