Sanjay Nair's Blog

AI buzzwords are everywhere.

Software engineers understand technical debt.

Every leadership decision about team composition is a strategic bet.

I get asked how I stay informed as a technology professional when the industry seems to be moving faster than it ever has and the demands of staying informed to keep up have never been higher.

I recently read a blog post lauding the experience of using Claude Code for Web.

I spend lots of time speaking with friends and other technology professionals about a wide variety of topics from career advice, technology hype cycles, how to lead people, and finding success in our personal endeavors.

I've spent the better part of the past decade as a technology professional, moving up and across multiple roles of software engineering and leadership.

I constantly encourage my teams to leverage Generative AI (GenAI) in their daily work.

I have been self-hosting a fleet of Minecraft servers on and off since around 2022.

This year, with the buzz of GenAI's burgeoning capabilities as a pair programmer looming large over my industry, I took the opportunity to find out whether the hype was real.

This document should serve as a concise artifact that describes my style of work and leadership.

Editor's note · June 2026 The GitHub developer API link in this post has been updated to its current canonical URL.

Think back to the last time you checked the tracking information for a package you were expecting to receive.

Editor's note · June 2026 All of the GitHub help links in this post have been updated to their current canonical URLs.

One of the most common tropes of working as a software engineer I've noticed is the constant lambasting of old code.

Editor's note · May 2026 When this post was written the site ran on Gatsby.

Editor's note · June 2026 All of the GitHub help links in this post have been updated to their current canonical URLs.

Editor's note · June 2026 The GitHub help link in this post has been updated to its current canonical URL.

As software engineers, there are lots of tools available for us to use.

Editor's note · June 2026 Two Google AI references in this post have been updated to their current canonical URLs.

In a previous post about continuous integration and deployment, I alluded to the practice of constantly putting code through various tests and making the results visible, whether within a software team or to the public for an opensource project.

Editor's note · June 2026 Two external references in this post have been refreshed: the Stack Overflow 2018 Developer Survey citation in the image caption below was updated from insights.stackoverflow.com (the old subdomain Stack Overflow used for survey…

This article will teach you how to write your very own Slack chatbot that answers simple questions using some basic machine learning tools.

This post was originally published when I was in college in 2014.

Editor's note · June 2026 The Travis CI links in this post (travis-ci.com and travis-ci.com/getting_started) are preserved as the canonical service URL but are largely obsolete in 2026 - Travis CI retired its free open-source tier in 2020 and the service…

Callbacks vs Promises vs Async/Await JavaScript and many other programming languages support an abstraction known as asynchronous execution.

Editor's note · June 2026 The Vagrant and Vault product links below have been updated to their current canonical URLs.

Disclaimer: This article is aimed at beginners to software development or those looking to enhance their personal project experience.