What is the difference between CTO and Head of Engineering / VP of Technology at a 30–100 people company? — Contra is growing fast and we are bringing in people that are taking over some of the responsibilities that were owned by the CEO/CTO at the early stages of the company. For CEO, that’s noticeable with Head of Product. For CTO, that’s most likely to be Head of Engineering. However…

As the world becomes “virtual first”, businesses need to step up their company culture game beyond motivational posters in the office. — Originally published by Tracy Chen on Snack Blog. The pandemic accelerated the shift to a fully-remote or hybrid workforce, and companies had to quickly adopt new collaboration tech and processes to enable employees to work from home. Similarly, transitioning to a remote work culture requires intention and effort, and businesses…

A story of shameless persistence to inspire those who are seeking their first job in IT. — It was 2012. I was in a university. I was obsessed with building games. The moment I read about Node.js, I thought of it as the future of online gaming. I began studying Node.js documentation. The goal was to learn the basics and find a freelancing project to work on…

.gitignore should be a whitelist, not a blacklist of files you want to include. If we look at a bunch of random open-source projects, they all instead try to exclude every known undesirable file, e.g. https://github.com/streamich/react-use/blob/master/.gitignore https://github.com/facebook/relay/blob/master/.gitignore https://github.com/webpack/webpack/blob/master/.gitignore This setup means that whenever a new developer joins the team or…

Tips for when the novelty of remote working wears off — (Originally posted on https://aboutsnack.com/blog/why-remote-work-is-bad.) Many of us have unexpectedly found ourselves remote working this year. At first, it seemed like a dream — no more commute! No more tedious office politics! An extra hour in bed in the morning! …

What I learned from OnDeck & why you should join it too — (Originally posted on https://aboutsnack.com/blog/ondeck-magic-of-engineered-serendipity.) At the beginning of this year, I joined OnDeck — a fellowship of entrepreneurs at various stages of launching their startups — with the goal of expanding my professional network in the Bay Area and finding a co-founder for my next venture. OnDeck was designed as…

Tips based on experience evaluating hundreds of remote work job applications daily. — It’s super exciting to be working on a rapidly growing company, Contra. I am actively hiring talent using Contra’s community and popular remote job boards to scout for the best of the best for very specific skills. Every day we receive 100+ applications and I read through all of them…

I use pretty standard questions to run technical team standups: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Anything blocking your progress? The challenge that I recently encountered is that when these questions are asked in a written form (such as using a Slack bot), users tend to…