At NVIDIA, “Senior Software Engineer” can mean three different levels
NVIDIA’s career ladder isn’t linear, and it’s pretty hard to make sense of from the outside. I did some digging and asked around, so you don’t have to.
Archive for the category: Software Engineering
How 5,000 RPS Exposed the Real Bottleneck in Our Jetty Messaging Service
We started with a simple question: how much traffic can the service really handle? The answer was in understanding the system’s real limits.
Make Honesty Less Risky Than Silence for Your Engineering Team
Your team may already know the risk. The question is whether they feel safe saying it.
Runbooks Are Dead; Make Operations Executable
Static runbooks break under pressure. Operational knowledge should live in executable tools instead of documents nobody can follow at 3 AM.
The phrase that ruins every eCommerce project: “Just connect it to our ERP.”
What sounds like a small API task is usually a full integration problem: sequencing, sync vs async, edge cases, and an old system nobody fully trusts.
AI Is Only as Good as the Document Pipeline Behind It
Everyone is busy asking how big the model is, but the real question is what you fed it first - because if your PDFs are mangled and your OCR is sloppy, even the smartest LLM starts from the wrong answer.
Netlify’s CTO: You learn more from shipping 30 imperfect apps than from one perfect tutorial
Dana Lawson argues that AI has lowered the barrier to software development so much that the best way to learn is by building, shipping imperfect apps, and improving them along the way.
What If the Biggest Bottleneck Behind AI’s 10× Promise Is the Human Engineer?
Engineering teams are starting to resemble legacy Java apps hitting thread exhaustion. I believe change is unavoidable, and we need a better way to organize the work.
Choose a Database Because It Fits the Workload, Not Because It’s Familiar
The fastest way to create technical debt in AI is still the oldest one: choosing a database because it feels comfortable.
The Real Source of Truth Is No Longer Code – It’s the Specifications
AI can write the code. The harder question is whether anyone still understands what it was supposed to do six months later.