BinHong Lee's Blog

With the recent announcement of Meta Account, I wanted to share a small incident on how I helped mitigate one of the more glaring privacy issues that came up during development.

When I built GlobeTrotte last year, vibe-coding had just begun gaining traction but I was the “weird guy” who coded everything by hand.

I’ve done quite a bit of mentorship from short term (one session) to long term (multi-year), from high school kids to university grads or even senior engineers, so I like to think I know a thing or two about mentorship.

I proposed, built, and maintained the only logged out accessible tooling suite in Meta - which I’ve conveniently called “Logged Out Internal Settings” (hereafter as LOIS).

One of the most interesting examples is to look at any average person debating whether Jordan or LeBron is the GOAT.

I recently saw a post arguing that exceptional people are rare because they’re so focused on their craft that they skip “bureaucratic bullshit” and “often left other skills to rot”.

This was one of my first experience at causing a SEV.

In the previous runbook, I mostly focused on things to do during an incident as it happens.

It was Thanksgiving day and I was mostly chilling at home scrolling Threads while watching YouTube.

I’ve seen multiple different people fail their promotions due to “lack of technical complexity” in their work.

There’s a saying in Meta that ‘Nothing is somebody else’s problem’ but sometimes, it really is.

It’s a common problem at work where you see a problem but you’re having a hard time trying to convince people to support your attempt at fixing it.

Update: This article is now outdated.

Most software engineers think of this as “someone else’s problem” (usually a privacy engineer or security engineer), but realistically, there’s only so much stuff (bad code lol) they can catch.

I needed to share some object code across multiple repos (to ensure the consistency of the RESTful API JSON serialization and deserialization).

We love celebrating heroes in general.

I wrote a similar version of this internally at Meta a few years ago for my org after finding myself in the middle of a few SEV1s in a row – and being consulted / asked for support in other similar situations.

I’m largely approaching this from the perspective of building an internal dev tool (since this is mostly where my personal experiences are coming from), especially if you’re someone who wants to build an internal tool but is having trouble framing it in a…

For years, I built and maintained the only logged-out accessible dev tool set / platform at Meta.

I keep hearing about vibe-coding and I’ve always written the majority of code myself.

Mature growth teams would organize a centralized experiment review meeting as a way to share learnings to a wider audience, consult for feedback / next step recommendations, while also holding engineers accountable for the changes they are attempting to s…

While I’ve shipped a lot of growth wins (literally the first line on my resume), I’m actually very far from a prototypical growth engineer.

It’s never easy to come up with new ideas that help with growth, but identifying the problem makes it easier.

This is a basic introduction on how to run a good A/B test.

Every time there’s a major outage at Meta, the first question I get from friends and family is usually “did they fire the person who caused it?”

Ask a programmer to review 10 lines of code, he’ll find 10 issues.

When I had the idea on the series about The Opinionated Engineer, I figured maybe that’s something worth setting up a newsletter service over.

This piece is specifically more about Meta’s unique culture of “posting” about things but I imagine it can be a useful reference on communication in general.

Conventional wisdom is that writing tests slows you down, because the alternative is that you don’t need to write tests.

This post will focus more on the “why” and some of the quirks around doing so instead of the “how” since GitHub already have a very comprehensive guide around it.

A while ago, I saw this tweet thread from Simon Willison about how he added social media preview cards to his TILs.

As time goes on in my journey of experimenting with different technologies on building a web interface, I figured it’s time for my personal site to return to the fundamentals.

While Vue 3 has been out of beta for quite a while, (as noted on their website) a migration build is still a work in progress so the current advice is to stay with Vue 2 if it’s a non-trivial project.

While the defacto way of running postgres on Azure Pipeline according to this guide seems to be using the docker image, the MacOS image on Azure Pipeline does not have docker support due to some licensing issue.

When working on a project with Vue (TypeScript), I faced a lot of roadblocks trying to get code coverage to work.

I was working on a side project where I had the backend and frontend setup to run on different programming languages.

I recently started learning about Go to find out what’s all the hype about.

Its 2019 now, who writes shell scripts anymore?

What is Test Driven Development?

I own multiple domain names, and each one hosts a different side project.

Most people (including myself) host their personal projects on a third-party free Git hosting websites like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket etc.

Few months ago during my job search, I decided that I want to add some new skills to my arsenal (resume) so I went ahead to build a bill splitting webapp (and the month before, an Alexa skill).

What is CI and why should I care about it?

When speaking of building a backend API, the most common tools is either Spring Boot for Java or ExpressJS for JavaScript.

Ah, you’ve graduated.

Backstory # I lied, but maybe someone else could.

When the Linux Shell in Windows was first released, I used it and didn’t quite like it.