In the past two years, I have been seeing multiple initiatives to enable non-coders to automate their processes through AI. The general perception among organizational leaders is that, with AI and vibe coding, anyone can build programs that do exactly what they want without prior coding knowledge. While that could…
I get asked very frequently about my policy at Zid that we host exactly one intern/trainee at a time. The whole 6-month “batch” is one person. People at Zid and externally would say things like: why not have more? There are more people in the team who can coach.…
I had previously written an internal memo about how I conduct technical interviews at Zid, which has sparked an interesting discussion. There, I mentioned that, in technical interviews, I do not necessarily specifically look for technical knowledge — that is, how much the candidate already knows. Instead, I look for how…
I very often receive surprised-discontent faces from fellow engineers after I show them potential solutions to some highly contended problem in the team. It always turns out to be that they are not necessarily not convinced that this would solve the problem but rather surprised that the solution is simple.…
Philosophy and engineering are two subjects that can be viewed as two different worlds. Unrelated and of no use to each other. Philosophy is theoretical in its investigation, and engineering is an extremely practical discipline. In this write-up, I claim that these two fields have more in common than one…
"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection" (Butler Lampson). I think this quote clearly presents how crucial abstractions are as a tool for solving computer problems. However, as important as this topic is, we do not see proper attention drawn to it…
In the previous article, I introduced the software design questions and gave some scattered examples of the various questions. In this article, I will present a fictional business and try to apply the questions on it as a practical example. Before I begin, I would like to thank Atheer Alfawaz…
Last year, I published a collection of discussions on software design where I discussed a set of central principles that should be considered while designing software. Here, I move to a meta-discussion about what questions you should ask when trying to apply those principles. If you have not read the…