Best of Career — March 2026

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    Article
    Avatar of francofernandoThe Polymathic Engineer·6w

    What Really Makes a Succesful Software Engineer

    Technical skills get you hired, but five non-technical traits determine long-term success as a software engineer: patience (debugging is inherently slow and iterative), determination (roadblocks are inevitable and quitting is always tempting), a student mindset (the industry never stops changing so neither should you), accepting criticism constructively (code reviews and feedback are growth tools, not attacks), and communication (explaining ideas clearly to humans is as important as writing logic for machines). These meta-skills underpin all learning and career progression, yet no course teaches them.

  2. 2
    Article
    Avatar of tdsTowards Data Science·9w

    I Quit My $130,000 ML Engineer Job After Learning 4 Lessons

    A machine learning engineer shares why they quit a $130k Big Tech job despite good pay and perks. The four key reasons were: slow pace and bureaucracy at large companies, feeling like a small cog with little purpose, reliance on internal tooling that limits transferable skill development, and a narrow scope for meaningful impact on mature products. The author, 26, chose to join a startup as the sixth hire, prioritizing growth, ownership, and entrepreneurial risk over comfort and stability.

  3. 3
    Article
    Avatar of zaidesantonManager.dev·9w

    Don't become an Engineering Manager

    A former advocate for engineers taking management roles now advises against it in 2026. Three main reasons: the rapid pace of AI-driven tech change makes it risky to step away from hands-on work; the management ladder has flattened significantly (Amazon raised IC-to-manager ratios by 15%), making Director/VP roles scarce; and Staff Engineer compensation now often exceeds EM pay across the industry by 20-30%. The author remains an EM personally because they enjoy it, but recommends senior engineers wait a couple of years before making the jump unless their gut strongly pulls them toward management.

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    Video
    Avatar of techwithlucyTech With Lucy·10w

    This AWS Certification WILL NOT Make you a Solutions Architect (How to actually get hired)

    A former Amazon solutions architect argues that the AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification is largely useless for career advancement. Despite its prestige, the exam can be gamed through pattern recognition and AI tools, and employers increasingly view certifications without hands-on experience as a red flag. Instead, the recommended approach is a 20/40/40 split: 20% theory, 40% hands-on projects, and 40% networking, personal branding, and interview prep. The AWS Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Associate certifications are sufficient as a foundation before moving directly to real-world projects.

  5. 5
    Article
    Avatar of devtoDEV·8w

    One Sentence From My Senior Engineer Changed How I Think About Software

    A junior developer reflects on how a brief observation from a senior engineer — 'your notes are scattered' — reshaped her entire approach to software development. The post argues that being a good developer goes beyond writing code: it requires structured documentation, traceability, and building systems of knowledge that teammates and future-you can understand. The author shares how reorganizing notes by development tasks, system flows, and backend/frontend behaviors improved her ability to revisit and maintain work. The piece also touches on the value of mentorship for underrepresented developers entering tech without traditional guidance.

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    Video
    Avatar of techworldwithnanaTechWorld with Nana·9w

    She Quit Her Stable Job to Become a DevOps Engineer (And is Now a Golden Kubestronaut)

    Anna Pedra, a former industrial engineer in medical devices, shares her journey switching careers into DevOps with no prior IT background. She outlines a 'triple proof strategy' for breaking into the field: professional cloud certifications (AWS, Azure), structured bootcamp training with hands-on projects, and a strong GitHub portfolio. Despite initial interview failures, she landed her first DevOps role at Swisscom after intense months of simultaneous studying, certifying, and applying. She left after less than a year to pursue more relevant Kubernetes and cloud work, and within two years exceeded her original senior salary. Key insights include why certifications alone are insufficient, how portfolio projects drive interview success, and why choosing the right first job matters for long-term career trajectory. She also achieved Golden Kubestronaut status, becoming the first in Switzerland and first woman in Spain to do so.

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    Video
    Avatar of awesome-codingAwesome·9w

    Software interviews are getting insane...

    A breakdown of Anthropic's software engineering interview process for an infrastructure role, covering all five rounds over three weeks. Round one includes implementing an LRU cache using a hashmap and doubly linked list, and a task management system using a DAG with topological sort and priority queue. Round two involves building a concurrent web crawler with BFS, rate limiting via semaphores, and cycle detection. The system design round focuses on designing an LLM inference API, covering GPU batching strategies, KV cache memory management, and streaming responses. The second coding round requires reconstructing function execution timelines from sampling profiler stack traces by diffing consecutive samples.

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    Video
    Avatar of youtubeYouTube·9w

    Should you learn Go in 2026?

    A Go developer and former Twitch senior engineer makes the case for learning Go in 2026 despite AI disruption and tech layoffs. Key arguments include Go's dominance in cloud-native tooling (Kubernetes, Docker), its suitability for microservices, its simplicity making it AI-friendly for code generation, its robust standard library, and strong job market demand with competitive salaries. The GitHub 2025 developer survey is cited showing Go among the most admired and desired languages.

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    Article
    Avatar of systemdesigncodexSystem Design Codex·8w

    How Agoda Load Balanced Kafka

    Agoda processes hundreds of terabytes of Kafka data daily for real-time price updates from suppliers. Standard round-robin partitioning caused over-provisioning due to heterogeneous hardware and uneven message workloads. Static solutions like identical pod deployments and weighted load balancing were rejected as impractical. Instead, Agoda built a dynamic lag-aware system with two components: a lag-aware producer that routes fewer messages to high-lag partitions using Same-Queue Length and Outlier Detection algorithms, and lag-aware consumers that proactively unsubscribe to trigger rebalancing when experiencing high lag, leveraging Kafka 2.4's incremental cooperative rebalance protocol.

  10. 10
    Article
    Avatar of terriblesoftwareTerrible Software·9w

    Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity

    Engineering teams systematically reward over-engineering while penalizing simplicity, creating perverse incentives from interviews to promotions. Engineers who build elaborate systems get compelling narratives for promotion packets, while those who ship clean, minimal solutions have nothing impressive to show. The post argues that unearned complexity is the real problem, not complexity itself, and offers concrete advice: engineers should document the decisions they didn't make and frame their judgment explicitly, while engineering leaders should change the questions asked in design reviews and promotion discussions to make simplicity the default rather than something that needs defending.

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    Article
    Avatar of systemdesigncodexSystem Design Codex·9w

    What Happens to an SQL Query?

    A walkthrough of what happens internally when an SQL query is executed. Starting from the Transport Subsystem handling the connection and auth, through the Query Parser and Query Optimizer producing an execution plan, to the Execution Engine coordinating with the Storage Engine. The Storage Engine's components — transaction manager, lock manager, buffer manager, and recovery manager — each play a role in safely fetching and returning data.

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    Video
    Avatar of beabetterdevBe A Better Dev·10w

    AI is Making Junior Devs Useless

    Junior developers risk building shallow competence by relying on AI tools without understanding the code they ship. Five strategies are offered to counter this: learn fundamentals through books and studying experienced developers' code, study real-world system failures and postmortems, deliberately manufacture struggle by debugging manually before turning to AI, never commit code you can't explain, and prompt AI for multiple options with pros and cons to build genuine understanding. The core message is that developer value is shifting from shipping code to verifying and understanding it.

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    Video
    Avatar of stefanmischookStefan Mischook·7w

    Laravel Just Confirmed What Some Developers Don’t Want to Hear

    Laravel 12 has released an official AI SDK that provides a framework-native API for text generation, embeddings, tool-based interactions, agents, memory, structured output, and streaming. The SDK supports multiple AI providers (Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, and others) behind a consistent interface with automatic fallbacks for rate limits and outages. Beyond the announcement, the broader argument is that AI is not replacing developers but changing how development works — early adopters of new paradigms historically thrive, and trained developers with strong fundamentals and system-level thinking will be the best users of AI tools.

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    Video
    Avatar of codeheadCodeHead·8w

    Books That Made Me A CRACKED Backend Dev

    A curated list of seven books recommended for leveling up backend development skills, presented in a suggested reading order. The books covered are: Clean Code (Uncle Bob), The Pragmatic Programmer, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, System Design Interview (Alex Xu), Database Internals (Alex Petrov), Release It! (Michael Nygard), and Fundamentals of Software Architecture (Richards & Ford). Each book is briefly described with practical takeaways, from writing readable code and DRY principles to understanding distributed systems, database B-tree indexes, circuit breaker patterns, and software architecture trade-offs. A suggested reading order is provided, starting with habits and progressing to deep systems knowledge.

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    Video
    Avatar of TechWithTimTech With Tim·9w

    My Honest Thoughts on AI and the Job Market in 2026 (No Hype)

    A developer shares five observed shifts in software engineering in 2026: AI models now generate code faster than humans can review it, creating a code comprehension bottleneck. The skill gap between AI-adopting and non-adopting developers is widening rapidly. Junior developers face a much harder job market as companies expect mid/senior-level competency. The hiring process remains misaligned with actual job requirements, still relying on LeetCode-style interviews. Finally, soft skills and business knowledge are becoming more valuable than raw coding ability, with developers increasingly taking on product management responsibilities.

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    Article
    Avatar of systemdesigncodexSystem Design Codex·7w

    Inside Look at Reddit's Metadata Store

    Reddit built a unified media metadata store to consolidate scattered metadata from multiple systems into a single AWS Aurora Postgres database. The system handles 100K+ read requests per second with p50 latency of 2.6ms and p99 of 17ms. The migration used dual writes, backfill, and a Kafka-based Change Data Capture pipeline to detect and fix inconsistencies. For future scalability toward an estimated 50TB by 2030, Reddit implemented range-based partitioning using pg_partman and pg_cron, leveraging monotonically increasing post_id values to keep recent partition indexes cached in the buffer pool.

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    Article
    Avatar of faunFaun·7w

    System Design — Designing Intelligent UIs as MCP Client

    MCP (Model Context Protocol) enables a new architectural pattern where the UI acts as an intelligent orchestration layer rather than a thin presentation layer. An MCP Client UI can discover backend capabilities at runtime, understand tool schemas, invoke tools dynamically based on LLM reasoning, and chain multi-step workflows without hardcoded API calls. The recommended architecture includes an MCP Client SDK, a Gateway MCP federation layer, and domain-specific MCP Servers. Key scaling considerations cover tool metadata management, multi-tenant isolation, horizontal gateway scaling, and latency optimization through caching and parallel tool execution. Real-world examples include AI-powered IDEs like Cline and Kiro, and Figma's MCP server integration with agents like Cursor and Windsurf.

  18. 18
    Article
    Avatar of bytebytegoByteByteGo·6w

    EP208: Load Balancer vs API Gateway

    A system design newsletter covering several backend topics: the difference between load balancers and API gateways (and how they complement each other in production), an explanation of Model Context Protocol (MCP) by Anthropic, a comparison of REST vs gRPC across data format, API style, streaming, type safety, and browser support, a breakdown of session-based vs JWT-based authentication tradeoffs, and a cheat sheet of the most commonly used Linux commands by category.

  19. 19
    Article
    Avatar of seangoedeckesean goedecke·6w

    Engineers do get promoted for writing simple code

    The popular belief that writing overcomplicated code leads to job security or promotion is largely a myth. Engineers who write simple, clean code tend to ship faster, accumulate more successful projects, and build reputations as reliable deliverers — all of which managers notice and reward. Non-technical managers may initially be impressed by visible complexity, but over time they track results, not perceived difficulty. Deliberately overcomplicating work backfires through slower delivery, more bugs, and complaints from teammates who inherit the mess. The real career advice: it's fine to frame your work as slightly complex, but actually doing unnecessary complexity is counterproductive.

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    Article
    Avatar of sivalabs-blogSivaLabs·7w

    Feeling Left Behind in Tech? This Is Your 90-Day Comeback Plan

    Experienced developers who feel left behind by new tech trends often misdiagnose the problem as an outdated stack, when the real issue is their upskilling approach. A 5-step strategy is outlined: identify only the skills that repeatedly appear in job descriptions (core language, one framework, basic system design), learn in short focused cycles with immediate project application, build small but relevant portfolio projects, reframe past experience to highlight impact rather than tools, and prepare for interviews by focusing on communication and practical knowledge. A concrete 60–90 day plan breaks this into weekly milestones, from fundamentals through job applications and iteration.

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    Article
    Avatar of devtoDEV·9w

    I Planned an Exit Strategy. I Stayed the Whole Time.

    A personal account of attending a SheBuilds on Lovable hackathon event on International Women's Day, where the author—a non-engineer with a courtroom operations background—built Aftershow Atlas, a concert history tracker app with a Musical DNA feature. The post reflects on embracing a 'builder identity' without a traditional CS background, using AI tools like Claude for creative direction rather than writing code from scratch, and the unexpectedly welcoming community atmosphere of the event.

  22. 22
    Article
    Avatar of pulumiPulumi·9w

    Treating Prompts Like Code: A Content Engineer's AI Workflow

    A solo technical content engineer at Pulumi describes building a modular AI workflow system by treating prompts like code. Facing a one-person docs practice, the author created reusable Claude Code 'skills' (e.g., /docs-review, /pr-review, /shipit, /slack-to-issue) that share a central context file (REVIEW-CRITERIA.md) following DRY principles. The system was wired into CI/CD to automate PR reviews, dramatically improving contribution quality. Key lessons include modularizing prompts, version-controlling them, managing token costs, knowing when to use scripts vs. AI generation, and treating the AI as a conversational collaborator rather than a command executor. The approach turned a personal survival tool into a shared team platform.

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    Article
    Avatar of swizecswizec.com·6w

    Software engineer interviews for the age of AI

    A hiring manager shares how software engineering interviews should evolve in the AI era. Rather than LeetCode puzzles, the approach focuses on three stages: a screening conversation that probes fractal knowledge depth about past projects, a system design interview that reveals hands-on vs. theoretical understanding, and a practical coding exercise using a real stubbed codebase where AI tools are explicitly encouraged. The coding interview tests whether candidates can navigate ambiguity, ask business questions, read documentation, and ship working code with AI assistance — not just generate plausible-looking output. The core argument is that AI raises the bar: engineers must own and be accountable for the systems they build, so interviews should test judgment and problem-solving depth, not typing speed or memorized algorithms.

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    Article
    Avatar of bytebytegoByteByteGo·6w

    How Netflix Live Streams to 100 Million Devices in 60 Seconds

    Netflix's Live Origin is a custom-built server bridging cloud live streaming pipelines and the Open Connect CDN. Key architectural decisions include dual redundant regional pipelines for fault tolerance, predictable 2-second segment templates, and intelligent segment selection that picks the best candidate from either pipeline. To optimize CDN performance, Netflix extended nginx with millisecond-grain caching, implemented request holding at the live edge, and uses custom HTTP headers to propagate streaming metadata to millions of devices. Storage evolved from AWS S3 to a Cassandra-backed key-value store with EVCache write-through caching, achieving median latency of 25ms and supporting 200+ Gbps read throughput. The system uses strict publishing isolation, priority-based rate limiting (live edge over DVR), and hierarchical metadata caching to handle 404 storms and traffic surges. During the 2024 Tyson vs. Paul fight, Netflix handled 65 million concurrent streams.

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