Tyler Walker

Tyler's 2024 Goals

This past year has probably been the most difficult and challenging year of my adult life. Navigating a challenging work environment with layoffs and shifting priorities as well as several personal and mental health challenges, this year was just rough. On a positive note, I fit in a bunch of

Tyler's 2023 Goals (Revisited)

Travel outside of the country Last December, I decided that I wanted to travel outside of the country and navigate all of the hoops that come with getting a passport and traveling to another country. There was no way I was ever going to go through the steps to get

Tyler's 2023 Goals

Travel outside of the country I've somehow made it 28 years on this planet without leaving this country. For the longest time, I avoided travelling internationally because the thought of getting a passport sounded so daunting. Back in December I was talking with a coworker about travelling and

Tyler's 2022 Goals (Revisited)

It's a little late, but better late than never! It's a bit of a bummer that my only posts in the last year have been my review and goals for 2022 but I refuse to feel bad about that! A lot of great things happened this

Tyler's 2022 Goals

I've thoroughly enjoyed my time off these past few weeks. The weeks leading up to the break were stressful and I was starting to get burned out (especially knowing how close I was to a 2-week break). In the last few years, I've either not taken

Tyler's 2021 Goals (Revisited)

This time of year, I try to look back and reflect on my goals from the last year and set new goals for the following year. I've have got to say though... this year is a pretty hard one to reflect on. I've hit pandemic burnout.

4 Problems with Software Interviews

Earlier this week I posted a tweet [https://twitter.com/airercode500/status/1439675990574202880?s=20] about my frustrations with software interviews. After seeing so many of the stories that were shared with me, I want to summarize my beef with software interviews. I do think that interviews should be challenging

My road to becoming a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft

I started my vacation last week with some awesome news: I got a promotion! In September I'll officially be a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. In the interest of my fading long-term memory, I want to document how I think I got to this moment. Namely, I want

What are pure functions?

If you've started to learn React or Redux recently you've probably heard of pure functions. In this post, I'll be breaking down pure functions to their most basic properties and providing some advice for testing. Back to Basics One of the first functions people

What I learned as a mentor for Microsoft's Neurodiversity Hiring Program

I'm a firm believer that all mentor/mentee relationships should be bidirectional. As good as it makes me feel to help someone along in the early parts of their career, I learn a lot about technology & leadership by forming connections with people I'd otherwise probably never meet.

3 Ways Event Storming Helps Build Enterprise Software

In the last few months my organization has made move towards describing our problem space using Domain Driven Design. We build enterprise software that powers Microsoft's global computer networking services. In this space we use a hybrid of vendor appliances and homegrown software solution to provide a better

How 'water batteries' could make solar power more practical at scale

As I was wandering around the grocery store chatting with my friend Micah the other day, she started explaining this really interesting concept about "water batteries"; and how they could help the adoption of solar technology. One of the biggest problems with solar reliance is the fact that

Digital First Design: Engineering Without Whiteboards

My main interest in this paradigm isn't necessarily around pandemic working conditions, but what a hybrid working model is going to look like for the folks who continue remote work as some of their peers return to the office.

The 4 States of Engineering Teams

As I make my way through An Elegant Puzzle [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/an-elegant-puzzle-book-review/] I'm going to be documenting some of my thoughts and reactions. Today's is around what Will Larson calls "The Four States of a Team". In the book, he prescribes system

Tyler's 2021 Goals

Given that I just spent the last hour or so reflecting on my last year of goals, I want to keep these fairly brief. I've noticed a pattern in my writing is that I write a lot for the first few paragraphs and then it drops off. This

Tyler's 2020 Goals (Revisited)

I did this same kind of retrospective last year [https://tyler-walker.ghost.io/revisiting-2019-goals/] as a retrospective following the previous year's New Year's resolutions. Obviously, when I set my resolutions in December of 2019 I had no idea what was in store for me. Despite the

Let's stop solving conflict by "putting it to a vote"

One of the most important skills I've learned over the past few years is how to deal with conflict at work. If you're working with a lot of bright and passionate people there are bound to be profound disagreements; especially around group decision making. I don&

Avoid committing secrets by ignoring tracked files in Git

The Problem Secrets are things like API keys, user credentials, and certificates that will implicitly allow someone access to another platform or service. My team has a local.settings.json file in our repository that contains some secrets that allow us to call dependent services. In order to successfully run

Why I don't contribute to Open Source Software

I've had a few false starts contributing to OSS by finding a new-to-me project, skimming through their issues and trying to find an easy PR to write.

Management: Innovation and Maintenance

Basically ever since I started my journey to become a software engineer, I've wanted to become an engineering manager. It's literally the first thing I say in all of my interviews. As I progress in my career as a developer, I want to do more reading

3 Reasons to Use the New Windows Terminal Instead of Command Prompt

Since the start of working from home, I'm spending a lot of time on Teams calls helping coworkers debug their code. One of the hardest parts about that is watching people pull up cmd.exe to run their projects. While you can make improvements and customizations to cmd.

Working with JSON in C# 9 and .NET Core 5

System.Text.Json If you've ever worked with JSON objects in C#, you've probably heard of the NewtonSoft.Json library. While it's still one of the most popular libraries for serializing and deserializing JavaScript objects, Microsoft's new System.Text.Json library brings

Hosting GraphQL endpoints with Azure Functions

What is GraphQL? GraphQL was created by Facebook [https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/graphql-a-data-query-language/] as a way for clients to fetch the data they need at runtime. The website describes it with 3 simple bullets: * Describe your data * Ask for what you want * Get predictable results With GraphQL you write

Take your vacation time!

The last time I took consecutive days off was at the end of January when my friend and I went to New York. Even then, we left on a Thursday and we were back to work on Monday. The last time I took a full week off was last October

When it's time to move on.

A friend recently asked me about my decision to move from SAP Concur to Microsoft. Admittedly, my time at SAP Concur was pretty short; I worked there for a little more than 1 year. It does feel silly writing a post about switching jobs after having only done it once.