I hated writing in high school. It wasn’t objective like my favorite subjects, math and science. It also didn’t help that we had to write about old, hard-to-understand literature like Shakespeare. But my perspective on writing changed once I started working full-time as a software engineer. Writing Is the Job The way I worked…

Only 3 of the 56 classes I took at UCLA matter in my daily software engineering work. Any engineer would agree that those three courses are worth their weight in gold. All You Need To Pass Any FAANG Interview Without a doubt, the two most important UCLA CS courses are CS31 & CS32. These classes are how engineering…

I was shocked at how obvious my mistakes as an engineer became after my perspective changed. Taking on manager responsibilities for the first time revealed mistakes I had made as an engineer. Here are the top three things I could only see after becoming a manager. People problems are as important as “real” problems Over the years, I’ve…

I received the first critical feedback of my career after my first promotion. Even though I was having more impact on my projects, my manager told me that I needed to change something or else we would have a serious problem. Career growth for junior engineers comes from completing larger…

Code review is an important skill that isn’t taught until you’re thrown into the fire. Don’t learn the hard way. In just a few minutes, this article will teach you how to start reviewing code even when you don’t have context on it. I didn’t review any code when I…

My career had a rough start, but I learned something that changed my trajectory forever, which helped me grow from a new grad (IC3) to a staff engineer (IC6) in 3 years. At my first job, I was responsible for maintaining a database script that my manager had written by…

In order to streamline our internal blog operations, all future Instagram Engineering content will be posted on the Engineering at Meta blog located here. This will allow us to post more regularly about the novel engineering work being done at Instagram. To stay connected for future content, you can follow…