Hi there 👋 welcome to Syntax Sunsets 🌄

As Christmas wraps up for 2024, I glanced at my week’s screen time statistics. They’re not good. For a time of year designated for recharging and connecting with family, I spent a lot of it on my phone. Usually, when I feel guilty about my screen usage I explore extreme countermeasures. Most recently I’ve been looking at “dumbphones". As you might guess, these are very basic phones that support calls and texts....

“Leetcode style” interviewing has been the standard method of assessing software engineers for some time. This style of interviewing can be described as a one on one session where the candidate is given a coding problem to solve on a whiteboard while explaining their thought process along the way. This form of interviewing has long been criticized by candidates as an unfair assessment of the skills they need to perform the role they are being hired for....

When you are hired by a software engineering company for the first time it won’t take long for you to create your first pull request. Once you have shared this with your peers you will get your first taste of the code review process. It’s almost guaranteed that as you learn the ropes you will receive comments on your proposed changes ranging from implementation feedback to requests to add automated tests to cover your changes....

Over the past two decades, the rapid growth of big tech companies has made software engineering one of the most sought-after careers in the modern job market. But is it the right choice for everyone? Whether you’re just starting or considering a major career change, let’s explore the factors that make software engineering an attractive, or challenging, career path. What makes software engineering a good career I have worked professionally as a software engineer for 7 years now and in my experience software engineering is a great career....

In software engineering, the acronym SLA (Service Level Agreement) is ubiquitous but often misunderstood. This article aims to clarify what an SLA truly is and to differentiate it from similar terms like SLI and SLO, which are often confused with SLAs. What is an SLI To understand SLAs, we first need to understand SLIs. According to Wikipedia, “a service level indicator (SLI) is a measure of the service level provided by a service provider to a customer”....

As a child, I was a prolific reader. My parents would keep my bookshelf topped up with new material every week. I couldn’t get enough. Naturally, as you grow older, your habits can shift and change. So I slowly lost my love for reading. In 2017 I decided I wanted to rekindle this love of books. I discovered the Goodreads Reading Challenge and decided to give it a go. I set the ambitious goal of reading 12 books in the year....

I’m not an early bird by any means. All through college I remember struggling to get up for my 11 am lectures. Eventually, as I joined the working world my circadian rhythm shifted, and I found more time before work available for new habits. Fortunately, my current role as a software engineer provides fairly flexible working hours. As a result, my working day starts at 10 am. Add to this the fact I work from home most days and I have the freedom to define my pre-work hours right up until my first meeting....

*Your mileage may vary… Visual Studio: an IDE I tolerate For the past 6 years of my career, I’ve used Visual Studio as my main IDE for work. I’ve seen many iterations of it come and go over that time. As a result, I’ve gotten fairly comfortable with its quirks and would consider my usage fairly efficient. I am sharing some of the keyboard shortcuts I use most often with you hoping it will save a few extra keystrokes and clicks in your daily work....

Feature flags are a very powerful software development tool that allows you to enable or disable functionality at runtime. This is very useful if you wish to deploy changes to sets of production users and, for example, experiment on the features’ performance. They are also commonly used to disable features in case they are harming users. This is an alluring ability. However, the abuse of this technique can lead to unforeseen consequences, impacting the agility of your system to be maintained and updated by your team....

As a teenager, running was my sport. I ran 3 nights a week for training, with a race every weekend. Most of the races were cross-country, giving me a weekly hit of the beautiful Irish countryside and lungfuls of fresh air. I fondly recall the community that was built around these racing events. Even in races with as few as 3 participants, supporters would hang around and cheer on each individual....