6 Tech Opinions I Formed during my Year-Long Internship

I worked at ClearBlade for 15 months, 6 months in UI and the rest in MLOps. I title this article with “opinions”, and not “lessons”, because lessons are synonymous with facts, but this listing is by no means factual.

• Reading the source code is more responsible and often faster than asking the author, given that you understand the source’s architecture. This echoes item 1 in Matt’s reflection.
• Don’t force dumber code in the fear of others not understanding. Example: Paul Graham on Why Lisp?. Writing hard (but simple) code makes you smarter and inspires code reviewers. Here’s a good article on hard vs easy, complex vs simple.
• If you lack knowledge in an established research area (e.g., database, OS, etc), the best way to catch up is to read a textbook.
• The quality of a software correlates with how much internal information it has on its documentation. Of course, some software must reveal its internals. However, I find myself revealing unnecessary internal information when I am unable to articulate the usages.
• 9 pregnant women can’t give birth to a baby in one month (from The Mythical Man Month). I now understand how true this. Conversely, project managers must decide on this balance, and that’s why tech PMs should have tech backgrounds.
• And the most important tech opinion: Tech is created by people and for people, so people > tech. Software engineering sits in between computer science and social science. My experience at ClearBlade was enjoyable: People at my work were nice and acknowledged each other’s doing, my CTO reminded me to take vacations, and the list goes on.