Yusuf Aytas's Blog

The other day I was talking with one of my directs. We ended up discussing something we’ve both learned over the years. When execution works, the environment is quiet. Not slow. Not passive. Quiet. Execution happens. People work together. Nothing feels heavy. You sort of question if there’s management in all this or their very existence. That’s a good thing. Maybe, one of the best signals of good…

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Managers change more often than you realize, especially when a company is growing or downsizing. New roles, new org charts, new reporting lines. Other times, you’re shopping around and you find yourself interviewing your future boss and trying to read between the lines. Ultimately, you will have a new manager in one way or another. Sometimes you end up reporting to someone far more seasoned than…

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It was another lazy Sunday. And I like them at this point. You start to appreciate them more and more. I let YouTube’s algorithm land me on a few chess videos. Later, it pushed me straight into a scene from Kingdom of Heaven. It’s just beautiful. Hard to resist. The visuals, the atmosphere, the quotes. Long story short, I watched the director’s cut end to end. Yeah, I know.

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Interviewing has always been a big can of worms in the software industry. For years, big tech has gone with the LeetCode style questions mixed with a few behavioural and system design rounds. Before that, it was brainteasers. I still remember how you would move Mount Fuji era. Tech has never really had good interviewing, but the question remains: how do you actually evaluate someone’s ability to…

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Most of what we call progress in software is just motion. New tools, new frameworks, same problems. Maybe fancier logos. Our industry always has this collective thrill that a new fancy method, framework, process will make things infinitely better. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I’ve watched that excitement enough times to recognize its cycles. Years ago, a colleague was setting up Apache Spark…

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Everyone’s been talking about vibe coding lately. I’ve been doing it myself. Launched two projects. Okutaç and Caccepted. It’s the kind of work where you don’t analyze, architect, or overthink. You start simple. You come up with features. You poke at the product until it makes sense. You skip the logs, skip the diagrams, and rely on repetition and intuition until things start behaving the way they…

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How many times have you found yourself saying: “I worked all day, but I didn’t get anything done.” I know, we have all been there. We feel bad about it, too. On the surface, it looks busy. Your calendar is full, Slack is notifying you, and your todo list is endless. There’s no shortage of movement, and yet, strangely, very little progress. If you’ve ever felt this way, you’re not alone.

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If you’ve worked in software long enough, you’ve probably seen it: a CRUD app serving a handful of users, deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with half the CNCF landscape stitched together for good measure. On paper it looks impressive. In reality, it’s a Rube Goldberg machine solving problems the team doesn’t actually have. Contrast that with Levels.fyi. The site now helps millions of engineers…

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On September 3, 1949, a weather plane was flying over Japan. It detected traces of radioactive isotopes. These elements decay quickly, which means they had been created recently. The conclusion was obvious: the Soviet Union had detonated its first nuclear bomb. Since the last world war, nuclear power was limited to only one country. With this new development, a rivalry started.

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Engineers have been reaching a common ceiling in their careers for decades. The pattern goes like this: an individual contributor gets promoted to a senior software engineer, and their career trajectory levels off. Likewise, an IC who transitions to an Engineering Manager often hits a similar wall, wondering if they’ll ever advance to a senior manager or director. In the tech industry…

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