From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

My name is Vladimir, and I'm an engineering manager of a team building a banking app. Following the success of our core banking product, we've decided to expand to other financial services. In the last four months my team has grown 4x, going from a 4-person team to 4 teams totalling 15 people. It was, frankly, a shitshow, and now I see many...

Aspiring developers often ask me what's the best programming language to learn. Personally, I mostly work with JS — solid choice, but everyone and their dog learns JS these days, so it might be time to add some diversity. I'm curious — which single programming language covers the most bases for you, and gives you most career opportunities for...

It's hard to believe, but, starting mid-october 2023 I conducted 60 technical interviews and hired 10 people into our team. It's been extremely tiring: around 80 hours of active interviewing, plus writing interview reports, plus screening CVs and take-home assignments, plus onboarding new members — all while doing my normal work stuff. Still, I...

I've been working with svelte exclusively for a year now, but I still manage to shoot myself in the foot every now and then when using reactive state. Some of the confusion is due to my prior experience with React, but some points are confusing on their own. Today, I dive into svelte internals to understand what's really going on. When you mutate...

We've already learnt a lot about svelte's reactivity system — the primary way to work with state in svelte components. But not all state belongs in components — sometimes we want app-global state (think state manager), sometimes we just want to reuse logic between components. React has hooks, Vue has composables. For svelte, the problem is even...