Elena Sunshine

2023 was the year I almost died. In January 2023, en route to a snowboarding session with friends, I had a car accident. Like all major life events, it happened in an instant. One moment the car was steady, waiting for the vehicle ahead to turn right; the next, it was zig-zagging between lanes after a loud crash. Another car had hit us from behind, causing us to spin off the road. Fortunately, no oncoming traffic was involved and my partner managed to avoid a rollover. The car was a totaled. But miraculously, we all walked away with only shock but no major injury. This incident marked a turning point for me in 2023. After processing the event, I realized my greatest fear wasn't death itself, but dying with dreams unfulfilled. I could live with the consequences of my choices. But not with the regret of inaction. So, 2023 became a year of breaking boundaries. I started new projects, embraced fresh hobbies, and found my voice. It was the year I began my social media journey, sharing my experiences and learnings beyond my 9-5 job, the side projects, the internships I coordinate and the fantastic team I'm proud to have. 2023 is the year I went from no ideas to too many, to finding my “voice”. This didn’t come all of a sudden, but by posting on a regular basis ever since April. Along this new path I got to know some incredible and inspiring individuals who became my friends. And this journey lead to me coaching people outside my day job, a genuinely fulfilling and enriching endeavor. You all know who you are and I am grateful that we are connected. 2023 saw me embracing hobbies outside my comfort zone. I started sewing, progressing from a complete noob, afraid to power the machine and accidentally sew my own fingers, to actually tailoring my own clothes and getting lost enjoying the process. I also returned to painting after a long hiatus, overcoming my fear of bold colors and embracing the full rainbow. This year, I also taught my first in-person language course. Although I had done this online before, I was really anxious to do it in-person. But in discomfort we grow. I had a blast teaching and I already have students enrolled for 2024. 2023 was also the year I found my ground. The year I cherished my inner child’s dreams. And one of them dreams was to see live a concert of one of the most powerful and empowering women in music: Beyoncé. The experience was everything I hoped for and more. Due to that pivotal accident, I also realized that I like my limbs where they are now, the way they are now. So 2023 was the year I sold my motorcycle. Although fun and adrenaline inducing, I was reluctant to drive it again after the car accident. The thrill isn’t worth the danger for now. Lastly, 2023 was the year I decided to plant roots and find a place to call my own, which I did. Reflecting on the year, I'm humbled by how much was packed into it. It's true: people overestimate what they can do in a week but underestimate what they can achieve in a year. Stepping out of my comfort zone has been where I've thrived the most. Looking ahead, 2024 is about maintaining this momentum, facing new challenges and setting ambitious plans.

Here are 14 lies you've been told about the programming career. 🧵👇

If you are a senior engineer and think that teaching a junior on your team is not your job, you are wrong. What makes you a senior engineer is how much you can teach, more than how much you can code.

Sometimes you need a bit of nature to disconnect from the world and reconnect with yourself.

Software development is about solving problems for the business, by following an approach that's maintainable for the foreseeable future. Software development is not about design patterns. These are just ways to do stuff for specific situations. They’re tools. Don’t confuse knowing a pattern with having to use it.

@Franc0Fernand0 Everyone can get the technical skills. It’s the attitude and behavior that make all the difference. It’s the willingness to stay humble and curious while guiding and sharing your knowledge.

Well articulated, David. It is true that being a software engineer is “soft” on the physical part… But it compensates by being taxing on the mental one. Besides, the biggest challenge with these kinds of jobs is de allocating your mental space on a problem once the “work day” is over. You cannot just lock the door and move on. And that physical bit is also double edged… if you’re not careful, it can quickly degrade your health.

I'm sick of posts claiming software engineers are privileged divas with soft baby keyboard hands. ​ Critics forget about the high stakes. ​ Software is in literally everything. ​ Pacemaker bug? Patient dies. ​ Air traffic control bug? Hundreds die. ​ Blockchain exploit? Millions $$$ lost. ​ The stakes are high even when you think they're not. ​ Like Ashley Madison: Helping married people have affairs. Ethically questionable but low stakes right? ​ Wrong. ​ Their famous data breach caused suicides. ​ The code we write may have literal lives on the other end. ​ I'm not saying other jobs are lesser or easier. ​ I'm saying engineering software is HARD.

One thing that limits our learning is our belief that we already know something.

@ProgressiveCod2 “Your system evolves.” That one line is a lesson many have yet to learn.

How do you create a system with 99.999% uptime? Here's a simple answer: 99% of the time you don't need to. 99.999% availability means less than 6 minutes of downtime a year. Most businesses don't make enough to justify the costs of running such a system. - You need to spend more on hardware (storage, compute, and so on). - You need an architecture that is geographically distributed to achieve such levels of availability. - You'll need a robust monitoring solution with 24-by-7 on-call support to fix potential issues before they result in downtime. 👉 So - how do you create such a system? You don't create it. Your system "evolves" into a high availability system as your business makes enough money to justify the costs. The solution also depends on your evolution requirement.

@ProgressiveCod2 @Franc0Fernand0 The worst argument there is. Convoluted code is a sign you don’t understand the problem at hand. 🤣🤣🤣

In my experience, it's far more difficult to write simpler code than complex code Had the fortune or misfortune of working with senior devs who were masters in writing convoluted code. They gave the crazy excuse that it was for job security but it only ended up ruining their vacations😂

You don't need to write complex code to look smart. The simpler a piece of code, the more clearly it will show that you put effort into it. Simplicity is not easy. It isn't something you can do right away.

@Franc0Fernand0 Simple code is actually the hardest to write.

Cannot stress this enough. Pair programming challenges your ideas and assumptions. Pair programming makes you both the teacher and the pupil. Pair programming leads to better results. In the end, pair programming is all about building in public.

@GaborPfalzer So beautiful! ☀️

Grass touching in progress 🌱

@rixlabs There’s a short book I’ve read a while ago that made a really compelling case for the idea. The benefits of sharing your work as you go, far outweigh the “fears”. The book is intuitively titled “Show your work” by Austin Kleon.

Show your work It is important to show your work to people. As an employee as well as independent. Self advertisement feels strange and wrong for some people (for me at least 🙂) but it is important. Show your work doesn’t mean to brag, sell or bullshit people, it means expose yourself and be ready to take critiques and to progress. I’m really bad at this cause I’m bad at polishing something in a way that can appeal people. I will get better at this and I’ll try to be more open about what I’m doing.

@ProgressiveCod2 For most scenarios, a distributed session store is the way to go.

Should you even use Sticky Sessions? Before trying to answer this, let’s understand the role of sticky sessions. Sticky sessions make sure a user is always directed to the same server instance for every request they make. But why do we even want this? This is necessary when the server instance physically stores some user-specific information. For example, ✅ The server may create a session object for each client-server pair and store it in memory ✅ A user’s shopping cart details may be stored on a specific server instance. ✅ Maybe, the user is trying to process a file and needs to check the status from the instance processing the file. With sticky sessions, a user’s request goes to the same server instance as long as it is up. It doesn’t matter how many instances may be running. But there are a couple of downsides to this. 👉 Sticky sessions will stick. Hence the name. They sort of defeat the purpose of a load balancer. With sticky sessions, multiple users might get stuck to one instance while another instance doesn’t get any requests. Not a great thing for resource utilization. 👉 The session is gone if the server goes down Since the session is usually stored in memory, it’s tied to the life of the server instance. Of course, the user is re-directed to another server but the session info is gone. This might mean that the user needs to log in once more or the shopping cart they had created is wiped out. ⏰ Personally, I don’t see a reason to go with sticky sessions in most applications. Websockets are one area where sticky sessions are useful. It’s far better to have the session information stored in a distributed session store. Think of something like Redis or DynamoDB. You can then opt out of sticky sessions and let the load balancer distribute traffic evenly. Even if a particular instance goes down, the session info won’t get lost. Of course, one can make a case that the file-processing example from earlier can benefit from sticky sessions. But even in that case, you could store the status information for every job in a separate store. Sticky sessions without session storage make better sense if you have a very simple use case and the hassle of maintaining session storage is too much to handle. 👉 But I understand that your opinion may be different. What do you think about sticky sessions? Do you prefer using them?

@Franc0Fernand0 And from a point onwards, you get to deliver more and more value precisely by not writing code yourself all day.

Many developers don't get or accept that software is only a tool. The main goal should be delivering value, not using certain tools. You can solve a lot of problems without writing a single line of code.

@Franc0Fernand0 🤣🤣 surveillance mode: on.

I don't know why, but I feel a little too observed while coding today

The best way to keep growing is to always see room for improvement. When you can’t see the flaws in your own work, you can’t improve. The moment you think you’re great, you’ve hit plateau. So yes, imposter syndrome is actually beneficial. It helps you shape the best version of yourself.

Coldplay, you’ve been incredible. 🫶

@MStrehovsky 🥲 beautifully named variables otherwise.

I wish I didn't have to prefix all my variable names with @ in C#.