Welcome!

This is David Wetterau's blog. I live in New York City and work as a Software Engineer at Airtable. In my time at Airtable, I've worked on new user-facing product features, new product verticals, and on all-sorts-of AI things. For many years, I worked at Dropbox primarily on the distributed systems that store and sync files and folders for millions of users.

Posts

• Sep 22, 2024

  Review more code

  This post will probably be the first in a series on code reviews because I believe they’re greatly underappreciated. Every company I’ve worked at in my career has required that code is reviewed and approved by at least one other person before it is deployed to be used by the rest of the world. This is often something the company enforces for some compliance requirement, but I’ve also worked in really small environments where we still reviewed all of the code when we didn’t strictly have to. This system can feel overbearing and slow down teams, but there are plenty of benefits from doing them as well.

• Sep 15, 2024

  It’s just software, it can change

  Early in my career I was working on a project that ran into some undesirable behavior with an upstream service we depended on. My teammate took me over to the team that owned that service and we had an impromptu chat about what the issue we were facing was and why the service had this (in our view) unfortunate behavior.

• Aug 31, 2024

  Send pulls not problems

  I can’t take credit for the origin of this phrase, but I have used it many times. For anyone not familiar with Github’s terminology a “pull” request is (in non-technical terms) a proposed change to some code that a reviewer can choose to accept, request changes to, or reject entirely. A restating of this phrase would be something like: “don’t just complain about something, try to solve it”, but that’s not nearly as catchy.

• Aug 24, 2024

  Getting value from meetings

  Many engineers, myself included, struggle with meetings. Meetings occupy a significant amount of our working lives, and often get a reputation of being a waste of time, or something that impacts productivity in a negative way.

• Aug 16, 2024

  hello world

  I used to imagine that when I started a blog, I would resist the urge to make the first post about starting a blog. Alas, I fell into the same trap.