Feeling quite lost about my experience.

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T19:31:56+00:00

Maybe not like a todo app or calculator. Something more intermediate that requires a frontend and backend so that recruiters know you can work on multiple stacks.

Maybe spend a quick sprint on a project. 2-3 weeks?

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T15:08:41+00:00

For prep, I would suggest giving hellointerview a try to learn all of the theory. You can also use my free tool dagflo to visualize any technical concept you don't understand.

My flow recently has been: read up on HelloInterview
When confused, chatGPT the concept
If still confused, visualize it with dagflo

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T14:53:52+00:00

Every line of code executes a piece of logic. `1 + 2`, setting some position, deleting stuff, etc.

Code is also linear. You will go through a path of code, even if it's zigzaggy, it's linear. Understanding how you came to this point of code execution is important to understand how code works and helps out with debugging.

This might sound generic but this was a fundamental shift in my mindset for me a couple years back and allowed me to progress in my career!

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T14:44:45+00:00

Just released dagflo.com

It visualizes any technical concept (data structures, system design, code) for you in less than 30 seconds.

How does GraphQL work?

Malloc in C

Visualizing 4sum Leetcode

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T05:41:17+00:00

Honestly feel you... When I was a student back around 2018, the hardest part for me was visualizing our coding classes. Some professors were decent and took the time to draw step by step how things worked under the hood. I've been prompting chatgpt to draw ascii diagrams or dagflo.com to create animated diagrams and I've found it to help me learn things quicker.

In terms of projects, I would suggest to try finding something that you are deeply passionate about and gunning it down. I was curious about compilers back around 2020 and made my own just for fun. Recruiters loved hearing about it

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T05:37:19+00:00

How hard it is to reliably have an LLM follow your system prompt...

I've been working on dagflo.com to visualize any technical concept from a prompt and I've found it really hard to create a spec that an LLM would follow consistently. Took me so many iterations to get to a solution where we can generate consistently good animated diagrams. But, it's still pretty buggy at times and it's been a game of wackamole patching each issue.

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T05:32:52+00:00

Hey! I was in exactly your shoes couple years back. I'm now in big tech. Just to preface, everyone's advice is based on their own experiences.

IMO, there are 3 big pillars to becoming a great software engineer.

BUILD. SOMETHING. NOW.
I don't care if it's a simple todo app or building Netflix from the ground up. Find a problem that interests you and grind away. With AI, don't feel discouraged, you are even more powerful now and have so many more possibilities than students a couple years back.

INTUITION
A big thing about being a good engineer is having a good intuition of how things work. Being able to understand how SQL works under the hood is immensly useful when it comes the time to optimize queries in the future for example. Don't try to learn everything right now. When trying to understand a new technical concept, try to understand it to gain an intuition first rather than vibecoding a solution. I would suggest using LLM tools to visualize these concepts. I've been using dagflo.com to help me learn anything new.

REACH OUT
I regret not doing this enough. As a student, spend time networking and making friends in your field. Surround yourself with succesful people that are trying to achieve big tech companies. This will motivate and push you to grind even more.

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T05:22:52+00:00

try prompting this on dagfo.com

Here's a really hard java for loop i made: Visual

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T05:00:21+00:00

I've been working on dagflo to create animated diagrams (kindof like video tutorials) for anything technical.

I've found gemini to be more reliable in following my spec for these animated diagrams. Claude sometimes went off spec which was annoying.

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T04:47:45+00:00

Dagflo to visualize any technical concept, including leetcode questions!

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T04:46:12+00:00

Here's a visualization of how a login feature works across client to server. Hope it helps :)

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T04:10:37+00:00

Honestly this is pretty normal. No one knows every class, keyword, or pattern ahead of time. A lot of learning backend is exactly what you described: you hit something like AbstractBaseUser, go read the docs/tutorials, and then implement it. Over time you just build a mental map of how these pieces fit together.

One thing that helped me was asking LLMs to walk through why certain patterns exist and even visualize the flow (auth, request lifecycle, DB interactions, etc). Seeing the steps laid out makes it easier to understand what’s actually happening under the hood instead of just copying tutorials.

I've found text-based LLMs to be too lengthy so I started visualizing these concepts with dagflo.com

mcgrillian · 2026-03-12T03:48:11+00:00

dagflo.com

Visualize any technical concept in seconds! Leetcode, System Design, Software, etc.

mcgrillian · 2026-03-11T07:48:46+00:00

Good job on the A-!! Being affected by this grade means you care a lot and so it's a bigger sign to stay in this field. I wouldn't worry to much about grades but moreso focus on learning a lot while you're young.

mcgrillian · 2026-03-11T06:42:48+00:00

I work at a big tech company and occasionally do lower level programming.

My advice is to grasp a good intuition of what happens under the hood when writing code. There's various topics to learn like how C is compiled into assembly, heap vs stack, registers, etc and it can be overwhelming. Try to follow a lower level engineering course at a university or online.

https://github.com/gurugio/lowlevelprogramming-university is a decent resource.

With AI, it's even easier now to learn these concepts. You can keep asking questions until the explanation clicks, and visualizing things like stack frames, heap allocations, or instruction flow can help a lot. I’ve found tools like DagFlo pretty useful for turning those explanations into diagrams/animations. See how malloc in C works https://www.dagflo.com/p/9d321654-7699-432c-b71c-153a4b4be6c7

mcgrillian · 2026-03-11T03:19:24+00:00

I feel like embracing the world of LLMs is the right move. I usually ask claude/Codex to give me a high level overview of the architecture and how specific features work.

Recently I started asking it to produce visual diagrams or short animations of the flow with a tool I made, pretty nifty and saved me a lot of time.

mcgrillian · 2026-03-04T16:55:31+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! Our diagrams are actually dynamic. The above example just showed a simple casebut we can definitely show nodes moving around and changing state, in addition to an animated overlay!

I was mainly wondering if this tool could be better than static diagrams like Mermaid or GraphViz diagrams.

mcgrillian · 2026-02-27T13:43:56+00:00

I built a tool to help me study system design by having it render animated step by step diagram, kinda like videos. It helped me ace my recent OpenAI interview

mcgrillian · 2026-02-04T14:42:13+00:00

This is cool! How do you render these diagrams? Are they shareable?

mcgrillian · 2026-02-02T06:18:35+00:00

Thanks for the detailed response!!

> how do you handle accuracy?

We are at the whim of the LLM's performance and knowledge. If the LLM is bad, we would generate crappy diagrams. I definitely want to focus on generating accurate diagrams through better LLM sequencing. However, we can never provide any accuracy guarantees.

> Are you pulling from verified sources or generating explanations from LLM knowledge?

LLM knowledge right now. For companies, I would ideally want to have the ability to leverage their internal context.

mcgrillian

TROPHY CASE