The reality and misconception of 10x engineers posted on 16 March 2024

The common description of a 10x engineer is one that’s extremely efficient, that can produce ten times more work than a normal engineer – these exist in specific areas. For example I would expect an engineer that specialized in JVM performance to be 10 times (if not more) more efficient than me when it comes to debugging such performance issues (since I have neither the knowledge nor the tools at my disposal).

I think it’s more interesting to define these 10x engineers through their impact instead. This is possible as soon as you work in large engineering organizations. For example if an engineer makes 100 engineers 10% more efficient (e.g. by making the dev loop 10% faster), their net impact is the same as hiring 10 engineers, so they technically have ten times the impact of one engineer.

There are engineers that are paid 10 times more than others, and while it might be an effect of the job market, I think these are mostly paid a lot because of their impact through other engineers – not because of their actual code/design throughput.

The most important part of this post is that 10x engineers aren’t isolated engineers. They aren’t your selfish engineer hiding in a dark room writing code. They are the ones that share their knowledge, promote better tools and up-level their whole engineering org. They are the ones you should work and learn from – and my experience is that they’ll happily help you grow.

Have you met such engineers? How was your experience working with them?

LinkedIn post

Windows not found by os-prober posted on 04 July 2023

I recently bought a new computer (a Lenovo IdeaCentre G5 in case someone is curious). When installing archlinux (in dual boot), I couldn’t get os-prober to detect Windows even though I could see all the Windows file in /boot/EFI/....

I eventually just manually added a grub entry

menuentry 'Window' {
	search.fs_uuid <UUID>
	chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}

Where you can get the UUID of your /boot partition with blkid. Interesting enough if you put the wrong uuid, grub will complain but will still boot Windows.

Lenovo duet review posted on 18 June 2020

I recently bought a Lenovo duet because I wanted a secure tablet.

There are many reviews about the Duet and the TL;DR is that this a cheap device (300 USD) with an amazing price to value ratio. That being said, I wanted to talk a bit more about the ChromeOS experience on a tablet.

It is great.

As the world is moving to mobile first, sometimes browsers are being ignored. ChromeOS let’s you install/use any Android App, meaning that you are likely always going to have the app you care about. On the other hand, if there is no Android app (or if you cannot use it), you can just create a shortcut on Chrome that feels like an app. On my end there are two use cases that I really enjoy:

  • I can use the Nanit android app to keep an eye on my daughter while she’s sleeping
  • I can create a WhatsApp shortcut (feels like an app) such that I can use WhatsApp on whatever device I currently have opened.

The device is not as fast/sharp as my phone (Pixel 3 XL) but it’s fast enought that I have never feel hindered when playing games, watching movies or just browsing the internet.

Ah ! Vous dirai-je maman posted on 11 July 2019

One of the famous French children song goes like this:

Ah ! Vous dirai-je maman
Ce qui cause mon tourment?
Papa veut que je raisonne
Comme une grande personne
Moi je dis que les bonbons
Valent mieux que la raison.

The version that I remember from my youth is slightly different. One of my preschool teacher (Roselyne) taught this version such that we could sing it at home for Mother’s day. Since I couldn’t find it on the Internet, I thought it would be interesting to write it down for future generations.

Ah ! Vous dirai-je maman
Ce que je t'aime tendrement
Les bonbons et les images
Mais aussi les grand tapages
Mais c'est encore bien plus doux
D'être assis sur vos genoux