Amro's Blog

puns, pizza, and performance reviews

  • Hey Amro, what’s on your desk?

    I shared a Tweet with a photo of my current work setup and a few folks asked what I use so I thought I’d put together a blog post with all the hardware on my desk. I have conflicting goals in choosing the gear I use to do my work. For instance, I want to […]

    Amro Mousa

    January 12, 2022
    Uncategorized
  • Approaching Code Review

    Code review is great way to maintain and improve your team’s codebase, and like a lot of team process having an intentional, positive culture around it makes it better. One of my earliest patches at Twitter was adding a short-lived token-based system for logged out requests (think login, signup, etc.). The patch itself wasn’t so […]

    Amro Mousa

    December 13, 2021
    People, Programming
  • Facilitating Instead of Dictating

    Early in my career I thought showing my worth on a team meant having my ideas win. I was far too attached to those ideas, which left me frustrated when they weren’t chosen and worst of all made working with others more difficult. Over time I learned the right approach wasn’t to dictate solutions, but […]

    Amro Mousa

    September 2, 2021
    People
  • Delivering Difficult News

    Earlier this year I was asked if some engineers from our team could help build a newly prioritized project. Doing so meant putting our team’s current work at substantial risk of failure. I knew canceling our project was the right thing to do because the incoming request was more important and because continuing our current […]

    Amro Mousa

    August 23, 2021
    People
  • It’s About Managing Expectations

    Some time back my team was asked to take up a critical project on short notice. My product manager and I found out about the project on Monday evening and we were told it needed to ship on Friday the same week to 3 client platforms with a small team. We had just four days […]

    Amro Mousa

    August 9, 2021
    People
  • Software Engineering Isn’t Magic

    The other day I was chatting with a friend who is both very competent and early in their software engineering career. They had noticed it sometimes took others less time to solve problems than it took them, and when they’d ask for help, these folks knew the answer or could often point them in the […]

    Amro Mousa

    March 13, 2021
    People, Programming
  • Thoughts on Teams

    People have different value systems. Someone may value very expensive headphones, or cameras and you may value sneakers. Someone may value working really hard, and you may value having time to live and travel. It’s best to not push your value system onto others, because it can harm relationships. It’s okay and good that people […]

    Amro Mousa

    January 25, 2021
    People
  • Resolving Conflict with Empathy

    Note: I wrote the following note over a year ago, but only recently decided to send it to my newsletter. I’m not sure why I sat on it so long. Your [respectful] thoughts are welcome on Twitter. Empathy doesn’t always come easy, but it goes a very long way toward building trust with those around […]

    Amro Mousa

    January 25, 2021
    People
  • Finding Dependency Cycles in iOS Builds with llbuild UI

    Did you know the swift-llbuild project contains a debugging tool called llbuild-ui that can find dependency cycles in your iOS build? To try it: Enable the New Build System (In Xcode it’s under File, Workspace Settings) Build your project Open the Derived Data directory on your machine and find the build.db file generated by the […]

    Amro Mousa

    April 3, 2018
    Programming
  • Diagnosing “Dependency Cycle Between Targets” in Xcode 9’s New Build System

    Xcode 9 includes a new build system that can substantially improve build times. The new build system is more strict about build issues, but some of its diagnostic output can be difficult to reason about. One difficult to debug error is “Dependency cycle between targets,” which may appear during incremental builds where you may not […]

    Amro Mousa

    March 9, 2018
    Programming
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