My name is Marko, and I am a software engineer at Meta (formerly Facebook). I live in the Bay Area. This blog reflects some of my thoughts and observations as I navigate the life of a software engineer in the silicon valley.

What I learned from a project that almost failed

Posted on October 1, 2022

One of the expectations of engineers at my company is to come up with impactful projects to work on. I was lucky enough to avoid this process for a long time since the teams I worked on had more problems to solve than engineers, so there was a lot of... [Read More]

Anatomy of a blog post

Posted on August 10, 2022

As I mentioned in my habits-building post, I dedicate a few hours every week to blog writing. Doing this only further proved to me that writing is hard, and even though I was surprised by it many times, I still tend to underestimate it. There’s always something important about writing... [Read More]
Tags: random thoughts blogs observations

Building habits

Posted on July 16, 2022

Sometimes a book or a movie makes the whole nation rethink the basic concepts, and I believe James Clear managed to do that with his book Atomic Habits. If you haven’t read the book, stop what you’re doing and go read it. Many people I know have read it, and... [Read More]
Tags: habits self-improvement

Setting Goals

Posted on July 2, 2022

I was never good at setting goals since I thought that a software engineer doesn’t need to set goals, so I never even tried to get better at it. Over time it started becoming obvious that it is a must-have skillset, so I recently started setting career and project goals... [Read More]
Tags: self-improvement goals

You don't need to be right

Posted on June 3, 2022

Most people would associate being wrong with something negative, and there is a lot of truth to that. If you get the answer wrong on a school test or an interview, you might fail your test or not get the job. If you bet your money on a company and... [Read More]
Tags: self-improvement communication

Document your assumptions

Posted on April 22, 2022

In this post, I’m talking about two projects that I inherited that ended up taking longer than expected due to undocumented assumptions and how I plan to address similar situations in the future. Undocumented assumptions lead to suboptimal results Assumptions are made often and for different reasons. For the sake... [Read More]
Tags: observations assumptions

On ambiguity and being stuck

Posted on February 27, 2022

Senior engineers are expected to navigate uncertain situations and always be ready to come up with new solutions to the team’s problems. As seniority grows, so does the level of uncertainty and ambiguity. When I observe some of the people that I look up to, they never lack ideas on... [Read More]
Tags: self-improvement ambiguity

Welcome to my blog

Posted on February 22, 2022

Hope this is the beginning of something magnificent. I’ll try to use this blog to write out some of my thoughts and observations about my work, specifically around non-technical areas such as people, direction, communication and strategy. I am trying to get better at writting, and what a better way... [Read More]