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I got a take-home assignment last year from a company I was genuinely excited about. "Should take about four hours," the recruiter said. Build an ingestion pipeline, model the data, write tests, document your design decisions, and prepare a 15-minute presentation walkthrough for the panel. Four hours. I laughed, closed my laptop, and started on it the next morning like it was a sprint. Sixteen hours later I had something I was proud of. Clean pipeline, solid tests, real documentation. I submitted it on a Sunday night. Monday I got a form rejection. No notes. No feedback. Not even which stage I failed. Just "we've decided to move forward with other candidates" and a link to their Glassdoor page. That was the moment I stopped pretending take-homes are assessments. They're consulting gigs. Unpaid ones. The Scope Creep Nobody Talks About Five years ago, a data engineering take-home was a focused exercise. Model this dataset into a star schema. Write a few SQL transforms. Maybe a short README. Two to four hours, tops. Bounded, reasonable, and actually useful for evaluating how someone thinks about data. That version is dead. Today, 68% of companies use take-home tests, up 12% year over year. And the scope has quietly ballooned into something unrecognizable. Full pipeline implementations. Test suites with coverage thresholds. Documentation that reads like a design doc. A presentation follow-up where you defend your architecture to a panel. We're talking 10 to 20 hours of work, routinely, for a role you haven't been offered. Industry best practice caps take-homes at 90 minutes of expected effort. The reality? Candidates consistently take 2x longer than company estimates to reach submission quality. That "four-hour" assignment is an eight-hour assignment. That "weekend project" is a week of evenings. And 25% of companies are still handing these out like they're reasonable asks. Here's the part that makes my eye twitch: 71% of engineering leaders openly say take-homes no lon

Explore how my day as a senior leader looks now that I use 40 automations to help, and learn more about some of my favorites. The post I automated my job (and it made me a better leader) appeared first on The GitHub Blog .

What Are the 36 Stratagems? If you've heard of The Art of War, think of the Thirty-Six...

I'm 19. In four months I built 128 projects with AI — 61 GitHub repos, 15 MCP servers, a 7-department agent OS, the works. I shipped 5 . Total stars: 6 . Revenue: $0 . That gap bothered me enough that I did the obvious-but-uncomfortable thing: I had an AI audit everything — every repo, every project folder, 4,239 build sessions, 244 memory notes — and pin it all like specimens in a cabinet. No flattery. Here's what the autopsy found. → The full interactive atlas: https://builder-archive.vercel.app/en The number that explains everything 128 built. 5 shipped. It's tempting to read that as a discipline problem. It isn't. The build velocity is real — I once shipped ~20 vertical SaaS in a single weekend on a shared Next.js + Drizzle + Stripe stack. The code works. The UIs are clean. The problem is the last mile . README writing, deployment, the final 10% that turns a repo into a thing a stranger can use — that's where almost everything died. Not ability. Execution. The AI put it in one line: "Can build anything. Finishes nothing." Strength and weakness are the same coin Here's the part I didn't want to see: the thing that makes me fast is the thing that kills me. Because I can build deep, I lose the stopping point. Because building is cheap, I start the next thing before finishing the last. The audit scored two skill axes: Build (design → implementation → automation): advanced Distribution (publish → ship → monetize): beginner Every problem I have lives in that asymmetry. It's not a motivation gap — total commits across repos: ~4,800. The effort is enormous. It just never crosses the finish line into something public. The hardest thing I made is the one I hid The audit flagged a buried asset: a GCC/ZATCA e-invoicing toolkit — Saudi Fatoora Phase 2, EN16931 + Peppol validation, secp256k1 signing, Go compiled to WASM. The single hardest, most verifiable piece of work I've done. It's been sitting in a private repo. That's the disease in one example: the more valuable the th

Everyone says our job got easier. The people doing it are quietly falling apart. Here's the part nobody at the dinner table wants to hear: AI didn't make software engineering easy. It made it relentless. Your uncle thinks you press a button now. Your PM thinks the estimate should be half what it used to be. LinkedIn thinks you're either an "AI-native 10x engineer" or a dinosaur waiting for the meteor. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise is you, doing two jobs at once and wondering when you stopped recognizing the one you signed up for. If that landed, keep reading. This one's for you. 💡 The Lie Everyone Has Agreed To Believe The story the world has settled on is simple: AI writes the code now, so the hard part is over. It's a comforting story. It's also wrong in a way that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't sat in the chair. Yes, the blank-file problem is mostly solved. Boilerplate, scaffolding, the first rough pass at a function, all of that is faster than it's ever been. The problem is "writing the lines" was never the expensive part of this job. The expensive part was always judgment. Knowing what to build, knowing why it breaks, knowing which of the model's three confident suggestions is the one that quietly corrupts your data at 2 AM is where the engineer earns their salt. AI didn't remove that work. It buried it under a pile of plausible-looking output you now have to review, verify, and own. So the meter didn't slow down. It moved. You spend less time typing and far more time deciding, validating, and cleaning up. To everyone watching from outside, that looks like less work. From inside, it's a heavier cognitive load on a shorter clock. Sound familiar? The Treadmill Nobody Put On the Job Description The cost no one talks about is the half-life of what you know is collapsing. Five years ago you could learn a framework and ride it for a few years. Now a tool you mastered in January has three competitors and a new paradigm by June. New model, new c

Let's be fair. The title of this post is confusing at first, but once you read it in full, I hope you...

If you're learning Data Analytics and looking to build a strong portfolio, working on real-world...

Por muito tempo eu acreditei que programação e desenvolvimento de software como sinônimos. Na...

TL;DR For a long time, I told myself I would start documenting my journey later. I thought I needed...

Let me confess something a little creepy. I have a habit of peeking at other people's dev posts. Not stealing the writing — relax. I run a tiny read-only job that fetches the public pages on dev.to, Zenn, and Qiita and counts only the boring parts: titles, post times, like counts. Who published what, at what hour, and how far it traveled. Then it tallies the lot. The reason is petty: my own posts weren't landing. The content is already in my hands — so I wanted to know how much the rest, the when and how you publish , actually moves the needle. By the numbers, not by gut. So I counted across three platforms. And the conditions that make a post fly turned out to be roughly mirror images between Japan (Zenn / Qiita) and the English-speaking world (dev.to). Here's the story. First, my most important disclaimer This post is full of numbers, so let me put up a guardrail before any of them. This is correlation, not causation . A result like "weekend posts don't do well" could mean the weekend itself is bad — or it could mean people who post on weekends are just dashing something off on the side. The data can't separate those. Please read it that way. Also, I only keep aggregate numbers I computed myself . I don't store or reuse anyone's article body (read-only GET, count the features, throw the page away). I peek, but only at the overall shape . Nobody gets singled out here. With that out of the way — four findings I enjoyed. 1. The best hour to publish is just your readers' time zone This one came out cleanest. On Qiita , posts published in the morning win (+32pt in the GOOD group). Midday is +14pt. Evening is -32pt, late night -14pt. Zenn likes midday too (+27pt). Late night is -15pt. dev.to is the exact opposite. Late night Japan time scores +7pt — Japanese evening is actually weak. The trick is obvious once you see it. dev.to's readers are English-speaking, mostly US. Late night in Japan is the US working day. Zenn and Qiita readers are in Japan, so the Japanese morni

May 29 I wrote my first AI trainwreck story. June 18 I finished #15. People keep asking if this was...

I know it sounds strange, but I am in my first year in CS Major, and I don't like posting things on social media, but I found lately that companies are more likely to hire people who are active on social media like X (Twitter). For me, I genuinely post my projects on LinkedIn, but not sharing things like today I learned something new etc... What's your opinion about that? Or How can I manage that?

Gustavo Manso (Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley) e Nassim Taleb affrontano entrambi il problema centrale dell'innovazione, ma da angolazioni complementari: Manso con la precisione del contratto ottimale, Taleb con la filosofia dell'antifragilità . Entrambi convergono su un'idea contro-intuitiva: per generare innovazione dirompente, bisogna proteggere il fallimento. Manso: Il contratto come strumento di tolleranza Il lavoro di Manso si concentra sui meccanismi di incentivazione che rendono l'innovazione possibile all'interno delle organizzazioni. La sua ricerca fondamentale (2011) modella esplicitamente il trade-off tra exploration (esplorazione di azioni nuove e non testate) e exploitation (sfruttamento di azioni note). Manso dimostra che i contratti ottimali per motivare l'innovazione richiedono una combinazione specifica: tolleranza per i fallimenti nel breve termine e ricompensa per il successo nel lungo termine . Questo è l'esatto opposto del classico "pay-for-performance" (paga in base alle prestazioni), che funziona bene per compiti routine ma soffoca l'innovazione. Come ha osservato Bengt Holmström (1989), citato da Manso, le attività innovative "richiedono una tolleranza eccezionale per il fallimento" perché il processo è imprevedibile e idiosincratico. Uno studio empirico fondamentale — che applica direttamente la teoria di Manso al venture capital — ha mostrato che i VC più tolleranti verso il fallimento generano startup significativamente più innovative. Un aumento dell'1% nella tolleranza al fallimento del VC porta a un aumento dello 0,5% nelle citazioni per brevetto. L'effetto è amplificato nelle recessioni e per le startup in fase iniziale. Manso ha anche esteso questa logica al finanziamento della ricerca scientifica, mostrando come la struttura dei fondi influenzi gli studi dirompenti. La sua analisi suggerisce che le leggi del lavoro che proteggono i dipendenti dal licenziamento arbitrario — attraverso quello che gli studiosi chiamano "effetto a

Manually converting invoice data from PDF or Excel files into CSV format is one of the most time-consuming tasks in accounting and data management workflows. It often involves repetitive copy-pasting, formatting adjustments, and a high risk of human error. In many real-world scenarios, invoices arrive in different formats such as PDF, XLS, XLSX, or even HTML. Handling them individually can slow down reporting pipelines and create inconsistencies in structured data storage. The Problem with Manual Conversion Traditional invoice processing usually involves: Extracting line items manually from PDFs Reformatting Excel sheets for database compatibility Fixing inconsistencies in columns and values Rechecking for missing or misaligned data As invoice volume increases, these tasks quickly become inefficient and error-prone. Automated Approach to Invoice Conversion A more efficient approach is using tools that automatically parse invoice documents and convert them into structured CSV format. These tools typically: Read multiple file formats (PDF, XLS, XLSX, HTML) Detect table structures and line items Normalize data into rows and columns Export clean CSV files ready for spreadsheets or databases For example, uploading a multi-page invoice PDF can result in fully structured rows representing each item, without manual formatting adjustments. Why CSV Output Matters CSV remains one of the most widely used formats for: Accounting software imports Database ingestion Data analysis workflows Spreadsheet processing Having clean CSV output ensures compatibility across systems and reduces preprocessing work. Practical Impact Automating invoice-to-CSV conversion helps reduce: Repetitive manual data entry Formatting inconsistencies Processing time for bulk invoices It also improves accuracy when handling large datasets. Closing Note As data-driven workflows become more common in finance and operations, automating repetitive tasks like invoice conversion can significantly improve efficien

AI isn't coming for your job. It already showed up, merged its first PR, and doesn't need a code review. The question developers keep dancing around — but rarely say out loud — is this: If GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude can do what a junior dev does in a fraction of the time, what happens to junior devs? And more uncomfortably: what happens to mid-level devs in three years? The Uncomfortable Data Points This isn't speculation. It's already showing up in hiring data. Entry-level developer roles are contracting. Stanford's Digital Economy Lab (2025) found measurable decline in entry-level employment in AI-exposed roles — and software development is one of the most exposed. One senior dev + AI tools = the output of a small team. Brynjolfsson, Li & Raymond (NBER, 2023) showed generative AI productivity gains that compress what used to require multiple headcount into one. Goldman Sachs (2023) estimated significant white-collar labour market exposure — knowledge workers, not factory workers, are the primary target this time. This isn't the loom replacing weavers. It's the IDE replacing the person using the IDE. The Counter-Argument (And It's Not Weak) Here's where it gets interesting — because the doomsayer take isn't the whole story either. Every major technology wave destroyed jobs and created more than anyone predicted: The ATM didn't eliminate bank tellers — it lowered branch costs, banks opened more branches, teller roles increased for a decade The spreadsheet didn't kill accountants — it created an entire industry of financial analysts The internet didn't destroy publishing — it exploded the number of people who could publish The argument: AI raises developer productivity so dramatically that it expands the total addressable market for software. More products get built. More tools get created. More companies can afford to build what previously required a $500k engineering team. More demand for developers, not less. Where It Gets Complicated for Devs Specifically

Internmaxxing Somebody on your timeline this week called intern code "API slop."...

For years I treated burnout as a personal failing. If I was tired, I needed more sleep. If I was anxious on Sunday night, I needed to meditate. If I dreaded standup, I needed a better attitude. None of it worked, because I was treating an organizational problem as a character problem. Senior engineer burnout rarely looks like simple exhaustion. It looks like your pull request reviews getting slower. It looks like tech debt you keep meaning to document and never do. It looks like every "quick question" landing in your DMs, because you are the person who knows where everything is. The load is structural. You cannot meditate your way out of an org chart. Here is the framework that finally helped me, and that I now keep as a runbook. First, diagnose: acute or systemic A rough sprint is not burnout. A hard quarter is not burnout. Those are acute, and they resolve when the spike passes. Systemic burnout is different. The recovery never comes, because the structure that caused it never changes. You finish the death-march launch and the next one is already scheduled. You clear the queue and it refills by lunch. The mistake is applying acute fixes (a long weekend, a vacation) to a systemic problem. You come back rested, the structure grinds you down again in two weeks, and now you also feel like the rest "did not work," which makes it worse. A quick self-check. In the last month: Do you feel recovered after a weekend, or does Sunday-evening dread start by Saturday night? Is your reduced capacity tied to one specific deadline, or is it just how things are now? If your single worst recurring task vanished tomorrow, would you feel fine, or would something else immediately take its place? If your answers point to "it is just how things are now," you are dealing with systemic burnout, and the fixes are structural, not personal. Reclaim deep work with routing, not willpower Deep work does not survive on discipline. It survives on routing. The senior engineer's calendar is a public

Why Taking Feedback Positively Can Change Your Career As developers, engineers, designers, and professionals, we all want to improve. We spend countless hours learning new technologies, building projects, and gaining experience. Yet many people overlook one of the most powerful tools for growth: feedback. Unfortunately, feedback often feels personal. When someone points out mistakes in our code, resume, communication, or project, our first reaction is sometimes defensive. We feel offended, frustrated, or misunderstood. I've experienced this myself. But over time, I learned that the ability to accept feedback positively is one of the most valuable skills anyone can develop. Feedback Is Not an Attack One of the biggest misconceptions is believing that criticism is an attack on our abilities. When a senior engineer reviews your code and suggests improvements, they are not saying you're a bad developer. When a recruiter rejects your resume, they are not saying you're incapable. When users report problems in your open-source project, they are not trying to discourage you. Most of the time, people are simply showing you where improvements can be made. The sooner we separate our ego from our work, the faster we grow. Every Rejection Contains Information Many professionals view rejection as failure. I view it differently now. A rejection is data. If ten companies reject the same resume, the market is telling you something. If users consistently struggle with a feature, they're revealing a usability problem. If interviewers repeatedly point out the same weakness, they're highlighting a skill gap. The goal isn't to feel bad about the feedback. The goal is to learn from the information hidden inside it. Growth Begins Where Comfort Ends Positive feedback feels good. Constructive feedback creates growth. Nobody enjoys hearing that their architecture can be improved, their communication needs work, or their project has flaws. But those uncomfortable conversations often lead to th

I’ve been a software engineer for more than 12 years. And like many developers, I’ve been watching AI improve at an incredible speed. Every new model seems smarter than the one before it. Tasks that used to take hours can now be done in minutes. Problems that required deep research can often be solved with a simple prompt. A few years ago, we used to say: Think of AI as a junior developer. That made sense at the time. But today, I don’t think that’s true anymore. AI still makes mistakes. Sometimes very obvious ones. But it also comes up with solutions that surprise me. Sometimes it finds an approach I wouldn’t have thought of immediately. Sometimes it helps me solve a problem much faster than I could on my own. And honestly, that’s both exciting and a little scary. But the biggest thing AI changed wasn’t how I write software. It changed how I think about my work. For most of my career, I thought I loved writing code. I spent years doing it. At work, on side projects, and whenever I had free time. Then AI became part of my daily workflow. In the last month, I’ve built more projects than I normally would in an entire year. Ideas that had been sitting in my notes for years suddenly became possible. And that’s when I realized something important: I don’t actually love writing code. I love building things. I love taking an idea and turning it into something real. I love creating products, solving problems, and seeing something that only existed in my head become something people can use. Code was simply the tool I used to do that. And now AI is another tool. That’s why I don’t hate it. In many ways, AI has helped me build more than ever before. It helped me revisit old ideas that I never had time to work on. It helped me experiment faster. It even encouraged me to explore areas outside software development, like animation and content creation. And this isn’t just happening to programmers. AI is changing design. It’s changing writing. It’s changing marketing. It’s changin

You walk into the RFP briefing. Your competitor has 200 people, 97% AI coverage, and a 4-day delivery promise. You have 15 people and a proposal you haven't even finished writing. Do you bet on better tech, or on understanding people better — and playing dirtier when you have to? This story is your answer. Act I · The Crack When Finova's RFP landed, everyone in the industry knew how big this was. Cross-border payment system. Multi-currency settlement + compliance + risk. Their last deployment had a P0 incident — an exchange rate module drifted by four decimal places in an edge case, and audit chased it for two months. So Finova's CTO made it clear: a $1.8M contract, and whoever signs off owns the result. $1.8M. Enough to keep a small testing company alive for a whole year. Plenty of firms showed up at the briefing. But only two were real contenders. QualiGuard — mid-sized, just closed their Series A, 200 people, their own AI testing platform called Aegis. A $1.8M contract was barely a rounding error for them — but with Series A money comes the pressure to show revenue growth for the next round, and Finova was a trophy client in the cross-border payments space. The case study was worth more than the project itself. Derek stood at the podium, flipping through slides packed with numbers: Aegis delivers 97.2% test automation coverage. Full Finova platform testing in four business days. No "we'll try." Just "we can do it." VeriTest — small, fifteen people. Marcus spent the whole morning working the room with Finova's people. I sat in the back row with nothing. Marcus slid back over and leaned in: "Their PPT makes yours look like a joke." I didn't answer. I was watching Derek's boss. Sarah — QualiGuard's VP, Derek's direct supervisor. She sat in the front row, off to the side, and never once looked at Derek during his entire presentation. She was on her phone. As one of the few women running a technical department, I watched her longer than I watched Derek. When Derek fla