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Get ready for a bit of a ramble about looking for a job as a software engineer in 2026. No, it's not about AI changing the definition of software engineering in 2026. But there's obviously some truth in that. It's about product engineering. Specifically, it's about the challenges engineers face when searching for new opportunities because of the massive shift toward product engineering. I should preface what comes next with this: Searching for a software engineering job in 2026 is really hard. Scroll through LinkedIn or any software career blog and you'll see plenty of posts about how the recruitment system is broken, how good engineers are being ghosted, how CVs are being filtered out by AI screening for keywords. These frustrations are valid, but... you know what else is really hard in 2026? Being a software engineering recruiter. Being a software engineering hiring manager. And software engineering is about solving problems. With that said, you can't solve a problem you don't define. So to lay the foundation, I want to address some challenges I've recognised before addressing what can be done about them. The Problem Space First, the thing that's been haunting me for the last 6 months. Impact articulation . I suspect this isn't a problem that's unique to product engineering, but it's certainly one I've faced as a product engineer. Earlier this year, I completed full interview processes with two separate companies. I felt confident about both. The roles were the type of engineering I'm great at: sitting close to users, working through ambiguity and owning product areas end to end. But neither resulted in a job offer. The feedback I received was surprisingly consistent: I demonstrated strong technical execution, methodical problem-solving, clear communication and product judgement, and consistently sought to understand the "why" behind the "how". But also, I struggled to connect my product decisions to business or user outcomes. It was clear that I was a great engin

One of the biggest transitions in a software engineer’s career is moving from “How do I implement this?” to “How should we design this?” As developers, we naturally focus on writing clean code, implementing features, fixing bugs, and improving performance. But as you move toward an architect role, the questions become different: 🔹 Scalability — Will this solution work when the number of users or transactions increases 10x? 🔹 Maintainability — Can another team understand and extend this solution two years from now? 🔹 Security — Are authentication, authorization, data protection, and secrets management considered from the beginning? 🔹 Performance — Where could bottlenecks occur, and how can we identify them before they become production issues? 🔹 Resilience — What happens when a dependent service goes down? 🔹 Integration — How will this solution interact with existing enterprise systems? 🔹 Technology choices — Does the technology solve the actual business problem, or are we choosing it simply because it is popular? 🔹 Trade-offs — What are we gaining, and what are we giving up with each architectural decision? A senior developer asks: “How can I build this feature?” An architect asks: “What is the right solution for the business, technical, operational, and long-term requirements?” The most important lesson I’ve learned is that architecture is not about creating complicated diagrams or using more technologies. Good architecture is about making the right decisions at the right level , understanding trade-offs, and creating solutions that can evolve with the business. And you don't suddenly become an architect because of a designation. You gradually become one by thinking beyond your code. Java #SoftwareArchitecture #SpringBoot #Microservices #SoftwareEngineering #JavaDeveloper #TechnologyLeadership #Architect

Engineers who only understand the technology, and never the business it serves, hit a ceiling early. The best ones develop commercial awareness — a real sense of how value is created, funded, and sold. Two days at 21BY72 Season 4, one of Bharat's leading startup summits — eighty-five ventures on the floor and live pitches in front of six hundred investors — was a concentrated lesson in exactly that, and I wrote about it in this reflection . Technology is a means; the business is the point It's easy, as an engineer, to treat the product as the whole world and the commercial side as someone else's problem. Sitting in a room where eighty-five ventures pitched to investors makes the truth obvious: the technology is a means to a business end, and understanding that end makes you a better engineer, not a distracted one. Watching founders pitch — being judged not on how clever the build was but on whether it solved a real problem people would pay for — reframes how you think about your own work. It pushes you to ask "who is this for and why does it matter" before "how do I build it." What the summit floor teaches an engineer Investors buy problems solved, not features built. The pitches that landed were about a real need and a credible path to meeting it — a discipline that improves engineering priorities directly. Commercial context sharpens technical decisions. When you understand the business constraints — cost, speed to market, who the customer actually is — you make better trade-offs in the architecture, not worse ones. Exposure recalibrates ambition. Being around people building real ventures at scale resets your sense of what's possible and what "serious" looks like. The takeaway The most rounded engineers I've come to admire pair technical depth with genuine commercial awareness. Spending two days inside a major startup summit, watching how businesses are pitched, funded, and built, was a deliberate investment in the half of the picture that a pure engineering educ

The AWS Community Builders program opens applications once a year, typically in early January, and closes within about two weeks. That's a narrow window. If you're serious about the 2027 cycle, you have roughly four months from now to build the contribution track record that gets you selected. I wrote my personal story about getting into the program from Cameroon. This post is different. It's a practical, no-fluff guide covering how the program works, what the application actually asks, what reviewers evaluate (based on patterns from people who've been accepted and rejected), and how to prepare starting today. What the AWS Community Builders Program Actually Is AWS Community Builders is a global program that recognizes people who share AWS knowledge publicly. Not AWS employees. Not necessarily experts. Engineers, students, content creators, and community organizers who consistently write, build, speak, or contribute to open source around AWS services. The key word is consistently . This is not a certification you study for. It's recognition of a public track record of helping others learn and build on AWS. The program sits below the AWS Heroes program in AWS's community ladder. Heroes are veterans with years of visible impact. Community Builders is the accessible entry point, and for most engineers reading this, the realistic first target. It's free to apply. Membership runs in yearly cycles with renewal based on continued activity. The Categories (Pick One That Matches Your Work) When you apply, you select a technology category. For 2026 the categories were: AI Engineering : Building generative AI applications with Amazon Bedrock, prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, agents Cloud Operations : Observability and configuration (CloudWatch, Systems Manager, Config, Service Catalog) Containers : ECS, EKS, Fargate, App Runner Data : Databases and analytics (DynamoDB, RDS, S3, OpenSearch, Redshift, Athena) Dev Tools : CI/CD, CDK, build pipelines, Application Composer Fro

Hello world! 👋 I'm Afee Muhammod Wafy , though most people know me simply as Wafy . I am a science student and self-taught web developer from Rangpur, Bangladesh. If you asked me what truly drives my journey, the answer wouldn't just be lines of code or complex syntax—it is pure, relentless curiosity. The Spark of Building Things From a very young age, I was always fascinated by how things work behind the scenes. Moving into science education naturally shaped how I approach problems: breaking down complex ideas, analyzing the core logic, and finding structured ways to solve them. When I first encountered programming, it felt like having an infinite canvas. I code not because it is an academic requirement or a routine chore, but because there is genuine joy in turning an abstract thought into something functional, accessible, and meaningful to real users. Consistency Over Perfection My learning philosophy is straightforward: stay consistent, stay humble, and never stop exploring . Every bug encountered, every new tool tested, and every experiment with full-stack development, modern APIs, or emerging AI technologies is a stepping stone. I believe true growth comes from getting your hands dirty with real-world problem-solving rather than just absorbing passive tutorials. Why This Journal Exists I started this dev.to journal to document my evolution as a developer in raw, unfiltered detail. Here, I'll be sharing: Real reflections on navigating self-directed learning alongside formal science studies. Honest lessons learned from debugging and architecting digital products. Perspectives on the ever-evolving tech landscape, open-source culture, and developer workflows. Let's Connect The tech community thrives on collaboration and shared knowledge. Whether you're a fellow student balancing studies with code, a seasoned developer, or someone who loves building things—I'd love to hear your story. Portfolio: amwafy.xyz GitHub: github.com/afeemuhammodwafy1 LinkedIn: linkedin.com

Contractor rates are falling, contract durations are shrinking, and the freelance labor market is flooding with senior talent — and the problem isn't the market, it's that contractors keep letting companies define the terms. A senior backend engineer — eight years of production experience, solid Go and Kubernetes chops, three reference clients — recently told a recruiter she was looking for £650 a day. The recruiter called back two days later to say the client had found someone at £450. The counter-offer was presented as good news. That's the state of independent tech work right now. Not a crisis, not a correction — something more mundane and more insidious: a slow, structural re-anchoring of what contractor labor is worth, driven less by any single market force than by the compound effect of layoff volumes, budget caution, and platform-mediated price visibility. Rates are going down. Engagements are getting shorter. And the freelancers accepting this are — not entirely without blame — helping it stick. Here's the uncomfortable claim: the ongoing compression of tech contractor rates is as much a self-inflicted wound as a market inevitability. The conditions that caused it are real. But the capitulation that maintains it is a choice. How We Got Here: The Supply Side Exploded The overrecruitment of 2021 and 2022 didn't just hurt the permanent hiring market when the hangover hit. Software developer jobs saw the biggest boom and bust in vacancies of any sector. No other segment saw hiring more than double in 2022, and hiring has since fallen faster in software development than anywhere else. The engineers who got caught in that bust didn't all disappear. Many turned to contracting. More than 100,000 people were laid off in the technology industry in 2024 alone, and at least some of them are not heading back into exclusively full-time work. LinkedIn's Services Marketplace, launched in 2021 to catch exactly this cohort, saw 10 million people create pages on the platform,

Over the past year, I've watched a lot of engineering teams go through the same adoption pattern with AI tools. They start using GitHub Copilot or Claude. Productivity goes up. And then someone in a meeting asks the question: "Do we still need as many junior developers?" I think that question reveals exactly the wrong mental model. The teams getting the most value from AI tools aren't the ones who figured out what AI can automate. They're the ones who figured out what AI should automate, and then designed their workflows around that distinction. That sounds like a small difference. It isn't. Most of the debate around AI and junior developers focuses on the wrong question: can AI do what juniors do? In a previous article, I explored why that question leads teams in the wrong direction. In another, I looked at what happens when organizations quietly remove the work juniors need to grow. This article is about what the best teams actually do instead. They don't pick AI over junior developers. They redesign how work flows. The AI and Junior Developers Debate Is Asking the Wrong Question The argument goes like this: AI can generate code, write tests, and produce documentation. Junior developers also generate code, write tests, and produce documentation. Therefore, AI can replace junior developers. This looks logical at the task level. But it misses something important. Junior developers aren't primarily valuable for their output. They're valuable for what they become while producing that output. Every bug they debug, every test they write, every pull request they review is quietly building something that doesn't appear in any sprint metric. You can automate a task. You can't automate the learning that comes from doing it. That's where the replacement narrative breaks down. What AI Is Actually Good At After using AI coding tools seriously for a while, certain patterns become clear. AI is fast and reliable for repetitive, well-defined work: boilerplate, standard implementat

An AI assistant will write you a query in ten seconds, the query will run, and the number that comes back will look completely reasonable. This page gives you the five checks that tell you whether that number is right. They take about two minutes, they need no tools beyond the database you already have, and they catch the four mistakes AI-written SQL actually makes. The order matters. The checks are arranged cheapest first, so the first one costs a single row count and the last one costs a short conversation. Most wrong queries fall to the first two. The short version. A query that runs has only passed a grammar check. The number is right when the rows, the filters and the denominator match the question you asked. The database only takes a query as far as the first gate. Why a query that runs can still be wrong Before the list: what do you think the database actually checks when it accepts a query? Grammar. That is the whole list. Spell a table name wrong and you get an error. Sum the wrong column, join in a way that doubles rows, or filter after grouping when the question needed it before, and you get a clean result set with a wrong number in it. Every mistake on this page is valid SQL. AI assistants add one specific difficulty: their queries are fluent. The aliases are tidy, the formatting is clean, and the shape looks like something a careful person wrote. Fluency reads as correctness, and it is not the same thing. Treat an AI query the way you would treat a first draft from a new colleague: with respect, and with the row counts open. The table the examples run on Everything below runs on one small shop dataset, so every number can be checked by hand. Thirteen orders in July, five customers, and a refunds table where two orders were refunded in two parts. Eleven of the thirteen orders are completed; one is refunded, one is pending. There is also a staff_accounts table listing internal accounts, and it contains one NULL row, because real lookup tables usually do.

Building in public You know the risk before you start. Everyone tells you: do not build something the platform could ship. You build it anyway, because you need it and nobody has it. Then one Tuesday the release notes arrive. What the months actually looked like I want to be precise about the cost, because the cost is the reason the release notes hit the way they did. Two hours of sleep on a normal night — not one heroic week, the normal shape of the last few months. Work during the day, build in the evening, debug until the birds started. Weekends were the good days, because nobody interrupted. What got built in that time: a memory layer for AI coding assistants. It saves what was learned after a fix and reads the relevant parts back before the next task. It runs over MCP, so it works in whatever editor you happen to open. It survives restarts, model upgrades and switching tools. I did not build it as a business idea. I built it because I was tired of explaining my own four servers to an assistant every single morning. The hour the release notes landed Anthropic shipped memory into Claude Code. Not "context improvements", not "a longer window". The word in the release notes was memory — the same word I had been using for months to describe the thing I was building. I read it twice. Then I sat there and did the arithmetic that everybody in that position does: months of evenings, the sleep, the weekends — against one line in someone else's changelog. The thought was not complicated. It was three words long. Who needs mine? If you have never had a platform ship your feature, the closest thing I can describe is finding out the thing you have been carrying uphill was already at the top. Not that it was wrong. That it was unnecessary. I did not open the editor that evening. That is the honest version. I read the docs, I read them again, and I went to bed early for the first time in months, which is a strange way for a bad day to end. Why the fear was rational, not dramat

Classic Machine Learning Through the Eyes of an SRE — Part 7 Picture a client health metric that has been flat at 2 out of 10 for six months. Ask PCA to compress your client-health data and that metric will contribute almost nothing to the directions PCA decides to keep. Not because PCA is broken. Because PCA treats variance as importance, and a signal that barely moves contributes almost no variance. Reduce the data far enough and the independent information it carried is simply not there anymore. But a CSAT frozen at 2/10 is not noise. It is a crisis nobody is escalating. And after compression, it may no longer be available to anything downstream. That is the bet, and in ops data it is frequently wrong. The critical signals are often the quiet ones. There is a cheaper version of the same failure that catches most people first. PCA measures variance in whatever units your features happen to be in, so a metric ranging from 0 to 10,000 can dominate one ranging from 1 to 5 purely because it is bigger. Standardize before you compress, or your first principal component may just be an elaborate way of saying "ticket count." Same class of bug as unscaled features in K-Means and SVM, and it fails just as quietly. What PCA actually is Third answer-finding strategy in the unsupervised set, using the same shorthand as the last two articles. K-Means SEARCHES: iterate and hope. DBSCAN DEFINES: declare a rule and traverse. PCA SOLVES: an eigendecomposition or SVD gives a direct solution rather than an iterative local search. No convergence to babysit, no restarts, no local optima to escape. Two caveats on the word "direct," both worth knowing. Many libraries will use randomized SVD on large matrices, which is approximate and stochastic. And even with an exact solver, eigenvectors are only defined up to sign, so a component can come back inverted between runs or across implementations. The variance explained is identical either way, which is precisely why nobody notices. Hold ont

Preparing for a Python developer interview often starts with coding problems. You practice arrays, strings, dictionaries, functions, and algorithms. Then you solve a few more problems and feel like you're ready. But an actual Python developer interview can test much more than whether you can write working code. You may need to explain your decisions, debug an unfamiliar piece of code, discuss Python concepts, or describe how you would approach a real development problem. Here are the areas I'd focus on before an interview. 1.Don't Just Solve Python Problems—Explain Them It's possible to solve a coding problem correctly and still struggle in an interview. Interviewers often want to know: Why did you choose this approach? What is the time complexity? What happens with edge cases? Is there another way to solve it ? How would you improve the solution? Try explaining your solution aloud after solving it. If you can't explain why your code works, you probably don't understand the solution as well as you think. 2. Know Python Beyond the Basics Don't stop at syntax. Review concepts such as: Lists, tuples, sets, and dictionaries Mutable vs immutable objects *args and **kwargs Exception handling Iterators and generators Decorators List comprehensions Context managers Object-oriented programming Memory management You don't need to memorize every Python feature. Focus on understanding concepts well enough to explain when and why you'd use them. 3. Practice Debugging Real developers don't spend all day writing code from scratch. A large part of the job involves understanding existing code and fixing problems. Take a small Python program with a bug and practice: Reproducing the problem. Reading the error carefully. Finding the likely cause. Testing your assumption. Fixing the issue. Explaining why it happened. This is also useful interview practice because debugging reveals how you think when the answer isn't immediately obvious. 4.Be Ready for Real-World Questions Depending on t

Can't believe I spent 2 weeks writing this. Last week, I gave a talk at a Cursor community event...

Within minutes of this post going live, this laptop goes back to the company. Work is handed over....

The Linux kernel, Fedora, and LLVM now require an “Assisted-by” tag on patches created with the help...

Well, first real job and I still haven't gotten used to waking up for a 6:30 AM shift... I've been...

30 React.js Interview Questions You Should Know Before Your Next Frontend Interview ⚛️ Whether you're preparing for a frontend interview or simply want to brush up on your React.js knowledge , this guide covers 30 real-world, scenario-based React interview questions that interviewers frequently ask. The goal isn't just to memorize definitions. These questions are designed to help you understand how and when to apply React concepts in real-world applications . 📌 Bookmark this article and come back to it during your next interview preparation session. 📚 What We'll Cover In this guide, we'll explore questions around: Conditional rendering API calls and side effects Form validation Performance optimization State management Component re-rendering Keys and lists Dark mode Dynamic components useEffect vs useLayoutEffect Large-list optimization And much more... 1. How do you handle conditional rendering in React? Conditional rendering allows you to render different UI based on application state or conditions. You can use standard JavaScript techniques such as: if...else Ternary operators Logical && Example { isLoggedIn ? < Dashboard /> : < Login />} 💡 Interview Tip For simple conditions, a ternary operator or && is usually sufficient. For more complex conditions, consider moving the logic outside the JSX to keep the component readable. 2. You need to fetch API data when a component mounts. What's the best way to do it? 💡 Key Concept The typical approach is to perform the API request inside a useEffect hook when the component needs to fetch data after rendering. A common pattern is: useEffect (() => { // Fetch API data }, []); The empty dependency array indicates that the effect is intended to run after the initial render. Note: In modern React applications, the best approach can also depend on the framework or data-fetching library you're using. 3. How would you handle form validation in React? A common approach is to use controlled inputs and perform validation during even

Most people ask: What will my first job teach me? The deeper question is quieter: What does it take to become someone who can finally be trusted with real work? There is a real tension in the first job. One view says it’s just a stepping stone — gain experience, update the résumé, move on. Another says it shapes you in ways that stay long after the job itself is forgotten. Both can be true. A first job can be temporary. What you learn from it may not be. The First Mistake Imagine a young graduate starting on a Monday. By Thursday they have already made a small but visible mistake — the wrong file, a misread requirement, an assumption that turned out wrong. They sit at their desk replaying it. What will my manager think? Did I just ruin my first impression? But the office doesn’t stop. The team keeps working. The next task arrives. Slowly they realize something that rarely appears on any résumé: A mistake doesn’t end a career. You acknowledge it. Fix what you can. Learn. Then continue. That lesson can stay with someone for years. When Nobody Is Standing Behind You College gives instructions. A first job gives responsibility. At some point someone hands you a problem and expects you to figure out where to begin. You may not know the answer. You may not even know the right question yet. That is when the real transition begins. You learn when to ask for help, when to investigate alone, when to admit you don’t understand, and eventually when to decide without waiting for someone else to tell you exactly what to do. Two People, One First Job Imagine two people joining the same company on the same day. Both are capable. Both make mistakes. One treats every task as something to finish until a better opportunity appears. The other starts noticing what each task is teaching — how problems are approached, how decisions are made, how mistakes are handled. Five years later their résumés may look similar. Their instincts may not. The difference isn’t necessarily who had the bette

Struggling with burnout? Procrastination? Reaching your goals? Let me share a few methods that help...

There is a moment in every high-stakes environment when something goes completely, objectively wrong, and the only viable response is to keep working. In my case, it was a pantry clerk who walked into the dry storage room carrying a stack of boxes, clipped a fire sprinkler head, and discharged what I can only describe as an impressive quantity of initially greasy water across an active commercial kitchen. We were told to continue service. It took four hours for the sprinkler system technicians to arrive and resolve the situation. We dried our shoes afterward. I have thought about that shift many times since leaving commercial kitchens for the technology industry. Not because it was the strangest thing I witnessed. It wasn't. Not by a significant margin. However, because the response to it was so instinctively correct. Nobody called an all-hands. Nobody convened a retrospective on the water. We just kept swimming. It turns out that lesson travels extremely well. A few weeks ago I wrote about how a non-linear career isn't actually non-linear, that the industries change but the underlying questions stay remarkably consistent. I want to make that argument concrete. Here's what commercial kitchens specifically taught me about performing under pressure, and why none of it required translation when I showed up in technology. The Kitchen Never Lies I spent years in commercial kitchens before I spent years in technology. Western Culinary Institute. Private golf clubs. A Lebanese restaurant. Bulk production facilities turning out ten thousand pounds of macaroni and cheese a day, five days a week. Country clubs. A casino. Catering. Culinary competitions. The environments were different. The underlying dynamics were identical. High pressure. Constrained timelines. Mismatched team experience levels. Leadership of wildly variable quality and sobriety. Outcomes that mattered regardless of what had happened behind the scenes to produce them. Customers who neither knew nor cared abo

By the end of this page you can read a budget vs actual table without being fooled by it, and build one in Excel that does not fool anyone else. You will know the variance formula, why analysts write F and U instead of trusting plus and minus, the two ways percent variance lies, and how to say the whole table in one sentence. It is about twenty minutes. Here is what to actually do today. Open the last variance table you were sent and find its biggest percentage. Then find its biggest dollar amount. If they are different rows, and they usually are, you now know which row deserved the attention, and it is probably not the one that got it. The short version: variance is actual minus budget. On a revenue line, positive is good. On a cost line, positive is bad. So analysts label every line F for favorable or U for unfavorable, rank by dollars, and flag by percent. The sign flip is the trap people fall into first, so it gets the picture. The original carries a diagram here. In words: Two panels, each showing a pair of vertical bars rising from a shared baseline. In the left panel, labeled revenue, a shorter bar marked budget stands next to a taller bar marked actual. The extra height of the actual bar above the budget level is shaded in the accent color and marked with the letter F and a check mark, because collecting more revenue than budgeted is favorable. In the right panel, labeled cost, the bars have the same shapes: a shorter budget bar next to a taller actual bar. But here the extra height above budget is shaded in the warning color and marked with the letter U and a cross, because spending more than budgeted is unfavorable. A dashed horizontal line runs across each panel at the budget height. The two panels are geometrically identical, and only the meaning of the line decides whether the overshoot is good or bad. That is why the sign of a variance cannot be read without knowing the line type. Every number on this page is verified. The worked example is a small dep