Career on Hi, I'm Braddy

Some advice to my younger self

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Build your own worldview

It is important to develop the skill and habit of thinking for yourself. This aligns choices with values which reduces regret, second-guessing, and a more focused growth. This also allows you to also resist trends and borrowed opinions. All in all, it’s clear standards and integrity, high agency, and cleaner tradeoffs.

Avoid generalization from specific experiences

It’s very easy to default to generalization from specific experiences, especially when contexts are not static. When listening, actively look for examples that weaken the theory and then find ways to improve on the theory. This way, we can understand the world deeply by improving our explanations.

Truths about software engineering I learned

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 12:00:00 +0000

After withdrawing from ETH Zurich in a degree for MSc in CS, majoring in Theoretical Computer Science and Machine Learning, I joined a startup in pursuit of making impact, learning with practical experience, and building. Here is what I learned.

The power of dogfooding and observability

It’s much easier to come up with ideas when using the product as you feel the rough edges firsthand which promotes thinking about ways to improve it. This is similar to instrumenting what users feel, you can’t fix what you can’t see.

Four disciplines in shipping what matters

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Recently at work, I started a recurring monthly session focusing on growing engineers, especially younger engineers. These sessions are mostly focusing on career advice, principles, and tools to make engineers more effective.

This session focused on how to increase impact and demonstrating that impact.

A small disclaimer before we continue, (good) advice is fuzzy because it entirely depends on the person receiving it.

Four disciplines

In software engineering, there are four disciplines:

You don't have to choose between infra and product

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Early in my career, I started out in a product-facing team, working on user-visible features, collaborating with design, thinking about experience and usability. It was rewarding, fast-paced, and full of feedback loops.

After a while, I knew I wanted to push myself further.

I didn’t just want to design interfaces. I wanted to understand the systems beneath them. I wanted to write code that was resilient under load, optimize for throughput, and work at scale. I wanted to build the kind of technical judgment that only comes from shipping real infrastructure.