Yusuf Aytas's Blog

Managers Have Been Vibe Coding All Along

Everyone’s been talking about vibe coding lately. I’ve been doing it myself. Launched two projects. Okutaç and Caccepted. It’s the kind of work where you don’t analyze, architect, or overthink. You start simple. You come up with features. You poke at the product until it makes sense. You skip the logs, skip the diagrams, and rely on repetition and intuition until things start behaving the way they…

Source

Stop Wasting Brainpower

How many times have you found yourself saying: “I worked all day, but I didn’t get anything done.” I know, we have all been there. We feel bad about it, too. On the surface, it looks busy. Your calendar is full, Slack is notifying you, and your todo list is endless. There’s no shortage of movement, and yet, strangely, very little progress. If you’ve ever felt this way, you’re not alone.

Source

Why Over-Engineering Happens

If you’ve worked in software long enough, you’ve probably seen it: a CRUD app serving a handful of users, deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with half the CNCF landscape stitched together for good measure. On paper it looks impressive. In reality, it’s a Rube Goldberg machine solving problems the team doesn’t actually have. Contrast that with Levels.fyi. The site now helps millions of engineers…

Source

Prisoner’s Dilemma

On September 3, 1949, a weather plane was flying over Japan. It detected traces of radioactive isotopes. These elements decay quickly, which means they had been created recently. The conclusion was obvious: the Soviet Union had detonated its first nuclear bomb. Since the last world war, nuclear power was limited to only one country. With this new development, a rivalry started.

Source

Climbing No More

Engineers have been reaching a common ceiling in their careers for decades. The pattern goes like this: an individual contributor gets promoted to a senior software engineer, and their career trajectory levels off. Likewise, an IC who transitions to an Engineering Manager often hits a similar wall, wondering if they’ll ever advance to a senior manager or director. In the tech industry…

Source

The Weekly Win

If you happen to work for a large organization, you’ve probably heard of quarterly check-ins or some similar corporate buzzword to describe what you’ve done and what you could have done better for the quarter. That’s fine, but both we as leaders and our direct reports always get caught off guard. I personally would scroll through Jira, Slack, and Confluence, trying to piece together what my team…

Source

Mevlana Candy

When I was a child, Rumi wasn’t a philosopher or a poet for me. He was candy. Every once in a while, a relative from Konya would visit and bring Mevlana şekeri. The rock sugar associated with Rumi. Sweet, shiny, and simple. How couldn’t I like him? For me, Rumi meant sugar, not wisdom. As I grew older, I started noticing Rumi’s words in books, in conversations…

Source

Brewing Turkish Tea

I love Turkish tea. If I go too long without it, especially while traveling, I start to miss it badly. It’s an addiction I have no intention of fixing. When I talk to non-Turkish friends or colleagues about tea, they usually assume it’s the same as any other black tea. To some extent it is, but not really. Turkish tea isn’t just dropping a few leaves in hot water and waiting three minutes.

Source

Onboarding Your Engineering Manager

Bringing on a new leader to your organization is always tricky. It starts with hiring. Then comes the real part. Onboarding! I always think bringing in a new leader without context is like starting construction without a blueprint. You’ll get noise and activity, but not stability. Perhaps, a few things are done, but in the wrong order. Walls before foundations. Progress on paper…

Source

Technical Deep Dives

When someone asks for a technical deep dive, they don’t care if you can detect a cycle in a linked list. They want proof that you actually understand the beast you’ve built. Can you walk me through the system like you own it, explain why you made the calls you did, and show me how it held up when reality punched back? That’s the game. In the world of engineering manager interviews…

Source