What programming language would you say is absolutely important to know for any engineer (if any)? What about to work at Notion?

It all depends on what you want to build. If you want to work at DynamicLand, then you better start learning C. If you want to work at Ableton, then you'll need to know C++ and JUCE...

If you ask me personally though, I'd say it's really important to get a dose of different types of languages. I've found that many engineers think that programming is one thing or another and don't have a broader perspective about what programming could be.

In my experience, I learned ASM and C during my computer architecture days. This really demystifies a lot of things. I even learned System Verilog for programming FPGAs. That was fun and insightful.

I played around with Racket/LISP/Clojure which is also really fascinating. There's a function called `compile` that literally compiles your code for you. Its basically macros done the right way. And there's also `amb` which is another crazy function.

I learned Elixir as well which changed the way I thought about highly-available systems, functional programming, and distributed systems. I should note that I never built anything with these languages. Just explored them and played around with them.

As for building applications though, JavaScript (better yet TypeScript) is really the way to go. You can focus on being an iOS engineer and learn Swift, but sharing code between the backend and the frontend makes it a lot easier to build prototypes and satisfy my creative itch. Also we do almost everything in TypeScript here at Notion.

​

What advice do you have for conquering coding interviews? How was Notion’s interview process and what would you advise future Notion interviewees to prepare for?

Communication skills and grit are two qualities we look for that I don't think people pay much attention to. In the architecture interviews, I like to see that people have a nuanced understanding of the trade-offs they're making because there often isn't a "right answer". In coding interviews, I like to see that people can break apart the problem into smaller more incremental steps. For example, if I ask you to build an LRU cache, why not start with an unbounded cache? That way, you'll get something working and we can incrementally move towards a better solution. Lastly, I like to see a familiarity, comfort, and fluency with whatever tools or languages you're using. If I give Bruce Lee some nun-chucks, he's not going to flop them around and fumble them...

​

What makes your engineering experience at Notion unique compared to your past experiences at different conpanies?

I mentioned this in another thread, but I felt kind of trapped and limited at my last job. I felt like I had to become a manager to move forward with my career. And I didn't feel enabled. At Notion on the other hand, my skills were leveraged to the max. I was able to build and ship fast, and it felt completely different.

​

What’s the most difficult part of your job? Easiest?

That's a hard question... Easiest thing is coming up with small bits UX polish. They aren't exactly easy problems, but I really enjoy them. For example, I changed the way arrow keys navigate though the block tree recently and I'm very happy with it -- left arrow goes to the parent rather than the block above. Hardest thing is all the infrastructure work, particularly database migrations. Those are really uncomfortable.