- Postgres – Window Functions
An aggregate collapses rows; a window function keeps them and adds a column. OVER and PARTITION BY, row_number versus rank versus dense_rank and which one you meant, running totals with a frame clause, lag and lead for comparing a row to the one before it, and top-N-per-group — the query that is ugly with a subquery and three lines with a window.
- Negotiating Salary
Few skills will impact your lifetime earnings as a software engineer more than knowing how to negotiate your salary. A single negotiation can mean tens of thousands of dollars per year — and that compounds over your career. Yet most developers accept the first offer they receive, leaving…
- Dealing with Failure
At some point in your software engineering career, you will deploy a bug to production, fail a technical interview, or watch a project you poured weeks into get cancelled. Every senior developer you admire has a graveyard of failures behind them — and those failures are exactly what made them…
- Relaxing
After fifteen years in software engineering, the most counterintuitive lesson I have learned is this: the best thing you can do for your code is step away from it. In an industry that glorifies hustle culture and late-night coding sessions, rest is not a weakness — it is a strategic advantage. The…
- Excellent Reporting
Most developers think career growth is purely about technical ability — better code, deeper system knowledge, faster debugging. But one of the most underrated skills that separates senior engineers from everyone else is excellent reporting. The ability to communicate status, progress, risks, and…