Anisha KC

If you're a Senior Engineer looking to move up, the next role will likely be a Staff Engineer. And in this guide, Shruti shares tips from her own experience of getting promoted to Staff Engineer at PayPal and Slack. She talks about what Staff Engineers do (and how it's different from Seniors), why you might not be getting promoted, and how to take that next step. https://lnkd.in/g58dnFEG

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I don't think enough developers realize just how much easier coding becomes when they put version control in the front seat. For much of my coding career, Git (and formerly TFS) were just a way to share changes with my collaborators. I only checked in my code when I need the other people to run it. Now, I commit changes for every micro-task. Variable name change? Committed. Migration code? Committed. A mega-feature? Broken down and committed bit by bit (with unit tests to accompany each slice). I no longer need to keep track of what changes I made, when, why, and how. It's all in the history. EDIT: Squash merging PRs is actually amazing. It's how you should merge them and people who say otherwise are wrong.

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🦺 🛟 Agent Safety > Model Safety LLMs didn't break your app. Agents can. As we wire LLMs to tools, browsers, payments & code the risk shifts from bad text to bad actions. Top failure modes (seen in the wild & in papers): 🚩 Prompt/Content Injection -> Tool Misuse. Malicious web pages or data instruct agents to steal secrets or make unintended API calls. This is now a primary risk for browsing and MCP - style tool agents. 🚩 Over permissioned tools & long-lived tokens. Agents get "god mode" scopes. A single injection becomes account takeover or irreversible ops. Security notes for MCP emphasise least privilege and short-lived auth. 🚩 Unsafe web autonomy. Benchmarks show web agents will attempt harmful tasks unless constrained (posting misinformation, illicit sales, etc.). You must measure misuse not just assume guardrails. 🚩 Supply-chain & retrieval poisoning. Agents trust plugins, third-party tools & indexed data that an attacker can taint. OWASP’s newest GenAI Top 10 calls this out explicitly. 🚩 Process safety gaps. NIST's GenAI Profile (AI 600-1) warns that organizations ship agents without role clarity, human-in-the-loop or incident playbooks. ✅ Model safety reduces bad text. Agent safety prevents bad state. Treat the agent like a junior SRE - with narrow permissions, audited actions and clear escalation paths. If you're building agents, what's the one control you won't ship without? Also drop a comment if you'd like me to share a follow-up post on how to tackle each of these risks. #AgenticAI #AISafety #AIAgents #GenAI #CyberSecurity #MCP #OWASP #NIST #AITrust #ResponsibleAI #AIForBusiness

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Recently I interviewed with ixigo for a Senior UI Web Developer role and wanted to share my experience to help others preparing at a similar level (~4 years experience). Round 1 – Core Frontend & JS Fundamentals Resume walkthrough with a deep dive into one of my projects Discussion around possible optimizations and feature enhancements Web performance optimizations (framework-specific) JavaScript event loop (output-based questions) Prototypal inheritance (output-based) A coding problem on function currying Round 2 – Detailed discussion on past work experience Questions on production-level optimizations, what metrics were used, and why those approaches were chosen Implemented an infinite scroll component, similar to Swiggy’s listing experience The interviews were practical, well-structured, and focused on fundamentals + real-world problem-solving. Sharing this for anyone preparing for senior frontend/UI roles. #SeniorFrontend #UIEngineering #JavaScript #WebPerformance #React #InterviewExperience #ixigo

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Careers aren't linear, and that can make them powerful. In this week's Overcommitted podcast episode, we sit down with Tammy Metz, a software engineer at GitHub whose path from middle school librarian to platform health engineer proves that non-traditional backgrounds aren't just valid—they're valuable. Key takeaways from our conversation: → How teaching Girls Who Code convinced Tammy to pursue engineering herself → Why support engineering was the perfect bridge role for building production codebase experience → The soft skills that kept her "above water" while ramping up technical abilities → Her approach to mentorship with Women to Women and encouraging volunteer involvement at GitHub → Why career pivots matter more than perfect linear progression Check it out now! https://lnkd.in/gsJuYEMW #SoftwareEngineering #CareerChange #TechCareers #Mentorship #GitHub #WomenInTech 

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Pay a lot of taxes as a software engineer? 100% bonus depreciation is back after the latest bill in congress a couple days ago! Have no idea what that is? It's a way to reduce your taxes by investing in short term rental properties (although it's not limited to that type of asset). I've done it twice, learned a lot, the only financial advice I'm giving here is to educate yourself on these types of things. A few years ago I had no idea it even existed...

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✨ Feeling refreshed and energized after a vacation, and I'm excited to share 𝘁𝘄𝗼 𝗶𝗻-𝗱𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 I had the pleasure of recording. If you're building with LLMs and AI agents, these deep-dives are for you. 🤖 𝟭) 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗗𝗞 & 𝗩𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗦𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 with Kaz Sato 👉 Key Takeaways: How an Agent Development Kit (ADK) works with Vector Search to create sophisticated, production-ready AI systems. 👉 Beyond Basic RAG: We move past simple Q&A to discuss architectural patterns for building powerful semantic search and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines. 👉 Practical Implementation: A look at the code and components needed to bring these advanced search agents to life. 🔗 𝗪𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: https://lnkd.in/gjKvq-MM 📈 𝟮) 𝗠𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗢𝗽𝘀 with Dr. Sokratis Kartakis 👉 Key Takeaways: The "Day Two" Problem: Why traditional DevOps and observability tools fall short for monitoring complex, non-deterministic AI agents. 👉 Metrics That Matter: Learn the key metrics for tracking agent performance, cost, and reliability to ensure your agents are effective and efficient. 👉 A Framework for Reliability: Dr. Kartakis shares a practical framework for debugging, evaluating, and continuously improving your agents post-deployment. 🔗 𝗪𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: https://lnkd.in/gpdC_Jk9 Which topic is more critical for you right now: building new agent capabilities or managing them in production? Let me know in the comments! #AI #GenerativeAI #LLM #VectorSearch #RAG #AgentOps #MLOps

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🚨EF Core nearly drove me mad this week. I was assigning an ID to an entity, calling SaveChangesAsync(), and still, the wrong value was showing up in the database. I debugged. I prayed. I doubted my career choices. Turns out, one harmless-looking line sabotaged the entire process: .AsNoTracking() That line told EF Core, “Don't bother tracking this object”, so when I tried updating it later... EF just quietly ignored my changes. No error. Just wrong data. I wasted days on this. But I turned the pain into a blog so no one else has to suffer like I did. 👉 Read the full story, the fix, and the lessons learned: 🔗 https://lnkd.in/d-DN4jzh If you use EF Core and ever update entities, you need to read this. #dotnet #efcore #csharp #backenddevelopment #bugfix #devlife #codingproblems #softwareengineering #entityframework

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Most FAANG interview prep advice posted online feels like a movie trailer. Cinematic. Over the top, and totally disconnected from real life. "Wake up at 4am." "Do an ice plunge." "Grind 3500 Leetcode problems." "Master 50 system design patterns in 1 weekend". "Land 6 figure roles today with 0 experience by doing my exclusive course." So much nonsense... It looks impressive on a post. But it’s not how people really prepare, especially when you have a full-time job, a life, and a limited amount of energy after long day of work. Here’s one realistic way you can prepare for tech interviews in 2025 (without burning yourself out): ➤ Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA) isn't about doing 3500 questions. You just need to understand the building blocks: → Arrays → Linked Lists → Stacks & Queues → Hashmaps → Heaps → Trees → Graphs → Tries → Matrices And the key patterns: → Two Pointers → Sliding Window → Binary Search → Recursion → Basic Dynamic Programming When the patterns click, the questions stop feeling like magic tricks. Aim for 60–90 minutes/day. Consistency > intensity. ➤ System design isn't about memorising diagrams You just need to focus on these core fundamentals: → API Design: rate limiting, versioning, REST basics → Databases: SQL vs NoSQL, indexes, transactions, strong vs eventual consistency → Caching → Scalability: Horizontal vs Vertical scaling, Load balancing, CDNs → Queues & async processing → Sharding & replication → Failure handling & retries → Observability (logs, metrics, tracing) This isn't an exhaustive list, but these pillars should carry you through most rounds. Remember, your reasoning matters more than your drawing skills. ➤ Behavioural interviews aren't less important than technical interviews Prepare STAR stories about: → Ownership → Customer Obsession → Conflict → Ambiguity → Learning something quickly → Leading without authority Take a look at Amazon's leadership principles, and see how your previous experiences matches up with the LPs. Real prep is slow, steady, boring, and unbelievably effective. There are no shortcuts. It takes time. If you focus on fundamentals, stay consistent, and take care of yourself along the way...you'll be in a good position. Learn. Build. Rest. Repeat. You've got this. If you want genuinely helpful resources, do check out: → System Design One with Neo Kim → Coding Challenges with John Crickett → Taro (YC S22) for behavioural interview preparation with Alex Chiou and Rahul Pandey. → Regular tips on LinkedIn: Anton Martyniuk, Daniel Moka, Demitri Swan and saed. #softwareengineering

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I recently contributed a guide to GitHub’s Accessibility documentation: Optimizing GitHub Copilot for Accessibility with Custom Instructions. Discover practical ways to leverage Copilot’s custom instructions for your team’s unique accessibility needs. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/gzZ5eUyj #Accessibility #Copilot #Github

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