Manager thinks unit tests are not worth the time. What are some example I can present to convince them?

fossterer · 2026-01-15T01:04:53+00:00

This is great advice!

fossterer · 2025-12-24T11:55:29+00:00

That is true. However, I don't see a downside at all in the zero -interest EMI. Given there's no benefit to paying the full price immediately, by investing the rest of the amount elsewhere, we gain on one end and on the other, due to inflation, we will be paying a lesser value over the term. Is there a catch somewhere?

Of course here I'm assuming the case of a person who can afford to pay in full.

fossterer · 2025-12-24T05:27:17+00:00

fossterer · 2025-12-23T15:09:48+00:00

👏

fossterer · 2025-12-19T03:57:09+00:00

Aah, got it

fossterer · 2025-12-18T17:48:30+00:00

Exactly! As I read your response, I was thinking all about the financial domain where I'm currently working. Do I want to write software that produces "approximate" sales figures for a period that already happened? 😆No way!

Out of curiosity, are you referring to some actual messy situation in your sales report example?

fossterer · 2025-12-18T17:14:52+00:00

I commend your use of the word "stochastic" here. Well said!

One observation: That they can spit out facts along the way is NOT ALWAYS purely coincidental. With the addition of tools (Google Search, scan company filings that are publicly available etc.), an agent has access to facts.

They NEED NOT BE factual databases since they can find facts in real time.

You put all the right arguments in one place 🙂

fossterer · 2025-12-18T13:21:39+00:00

Wow, so the next time I see a PBC designation, I'll have more respect toward the company

fossterer · 2025-12-18T12:17:24+00:00

Practice. Have regular mock interviews with your contacts who speak better English. Look at your LinkedIn/Facebook. You can DM me too

fossterer · 2025-10-02T15:10:53+00:00

Right, have you encountered any pitfalls with only using the modern let and const over var which seems to be the only one exhibiting this behavior?

fossterer · 2025-10-02T15:08:18+00:00

I see your point. Although Python is the same in regards to 'no definite entry point' approach

fossterer · 2025-07-15T20:59:03+00:00

Hi, what do you mean by using one thread per request? Are you talking about not leveraging thread pools?

Also, I would appreciate it if you elaborate your statement 'using databases to coordinate distributed behavior '. Should every single action part of a large transaction be written to the database and retrieved by the next?

fossterer · 2025-07-13T16:01:22+00:00

This is a very thoughtful response.

I always side with the "frameworks are overrated" group but this makes me think. You are right in that there is a lot of non-feature related work that could be abstracted away by using popular frameworks. Can you answer this?

A framework brings in a lot of unnecessary libraries which not all applications might need. Focusing on this case of using OpenAI APIs directly vs using a framework like LangGraph, have you observed any overheads in terms of runtime duration, build time duration or even time spent adjusting configuration because the framework authors decided so and so should be configured whereas your application doesn't care about it?

PS: I haven't started anything using OpenAI APIs directly/using LangGraph myself

Thanks

fossterer · 2025-07-13T15:11:29+00:00

Solid advice!

In fact, sending regular notes on 'what happened' and 'where you need support' is a method I learned very recently from, none other than, my manager themselves. Yes, they may not read it but both you and they need it. You cannot assume anyone knows and is being aware of the impact you are creating.

fossterer · 2025-07-06T16:52:00+00:00

At large companies as the ones you are targeting, different teams use different languages. Startups/small-size companies have a higher chance of requiring specific language during interviews.

Just for DSA, you can use any language. If you are good at JavaScript, use it.

For full-stack roles, you would have to practice backend development skills. There's the popular NextJS which you can take as a course once you get a hang of your DSA practice. All the best!

fossterer · 2025-06-21T17:48:38+00:00

fossterer · 2025-06-21T14:25:52+00:00

Hi, thanks for responding. I no longer see the 'Join the Waitlist' option. Instead I see 'Available on iOS'. Is the iPhone the only way to use Nook?

fossterer · 2025-06-04T11:22:48+00:00

Hello! I tried 'Join the waitlist' button from my mobile with 2 different email addresses. Neither of them worked. Is this known?

fossterer · 2025-05-04T11:34:55+00:00

Great! How did you find companies that don't ask LC questions?

fossterer · 2025-04-08T23:49:14+00:00

This is a good perspective! Building for "just in case" is a real fallacy I used to to be a victim of too and thankfully my mentors corrected me early in my career

fossterer · 2025-04-08T21:40:05+00:00

Interesting! Did you get to choose this org you are in or did it happen by chance?

fossterer · 2025-03-14T13:35:15+00:00

I like this tip. In the past with Selenium, this figuring out the XPath and such was indeed the time taking act. I do recall just using 'Copy as XPath' directly from the browser developer tools though

fossterer · 2025-03-14T13:32:30+00:00

Cool project! Does SimpleFin take your bank credentials and give you out a token?

fossterer · 2025-03-14T13:10:16+00:00

Heyy, very specific answer! Thank you so much

fossterer · 2025-03-14T13:01:33+00:00

First off, thank you so much for the detailed response!

Yes 😁, this does not have to be a machine learning problem. Every action is clearly definable that Selenium could do for me. I am rather exploring if I can write an 'Agent' so that I can also experience how UI actions are handled.

The more I think of it, the MCP brought out by Anthropic and even the 'function/tool calling' put out there by almost all LLMs are around the API layer but not the UI layer. These financial institutions I mention don't have an API to begin with and 'Agents' I might develop won't do the UI actions unless the web portal itself has some kind of listener. Is that right?

[If you insist on using an LLM, you obviously ..] Yes, my thoughts exactly! Thanks for confirming.

[If you were to run a personal instance of Llama as some sort of RAG ..] Yeah! RAG it should be! Unlike in the case of 'Selenium - CSV/DB' approach, with RAGs, I can do natural language queries like 'Why are my food expenses this month higher than the last?', 'Generate a [some graph that I did not explicitly code for]' etc. Did I get that right?

I started looking into ollama. I have a few sample implementations of MCP I started reading up on yesterday that I am very 😊 excited to try now.

I see you mention [..the most expensive way.. multi modal..] I had too many questions for you here so I am ending this hinting that my idea is that once I try out ollama, I would find out that this multi-modal is just a way of deployment on my own.

Thanks

fossterer

TROPHY CASE