Great APIs are opinionated. In this note, I will share the practice we promote at Facebook of how to write an effective API. #1 The Best API document itself At Facebook, we believe the API is written to be read. By looking at an API’s signature, engineers should understand how to use this API and the…

After the pandemic hits, more and more software engineers are working from home or working remotely. Some companies/teams are even completely turning virtual. FB allows employees to WFH every Wed for a long time. …

People are impatient. When we visit a website and request for certain data, cache plays a critical role in terms of waiting time. In this blog, I will share an introduction of cache: what is it and how to implement. What is cache? A cache is a copy of frequently accessed data stores…

Scalability means the capability of the system to process increased workload while maintaining the same latency. For example, if your system takes X seconds to respond to a user’s request. It should take the same amount of time to respond to each of the million concurrent user requests. For a…

In my last story “Junior vs. Senior vs. Staff Engineer”, I uncovered the responsibilities for Junior-to-Staff level engineer. But they are not the complete picture of a SWE’s career ladder, and the top-notch tier is still missing, aka “Principal Engineer”. In companies like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, it maps to…

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Shibacoin… You probably heard of all these crazy “coins” and news about their huge market value rise & falls. …

The React team recently introduced a major new feature “React Server Component”. It opens a new world for front-end engineers to build a performant app while writing less code. What the Problems? Nowadays, numerous react apps provide rich experiences. But, these client-rendered apps still need to fetch & parse data from the server. …

For any engineer working at a big corporate, building new features is only a part of the job. Another main part is making contributions to “Engineering Excellence(EE)”. EE also called “Better Engineering”, contains All the efforts that improve the quality & efficiency of the product. This responsibility is even higher…

Career progression is an evergreen topic for software engineers because it directly impacts income. In this note, I am going to share my personal perspective on the differences between Junior(E3–4), Senior(E5), and Staff(E6) engineers. Junior Engineer At this level, engineers focus mostly on demonstrating the coding capability and get familiar with engineering…