Hi! I’m Hussein.

I’ve been in the software industry for 13 years. I’ve worn many hats, but I care most about building an incredible working environment where engineers are happy, productive, and constantly growing.

I am currently a Senior Software Engineering Manager at Concentric by Ginkgo.

Work I love

Scaling engineering teams

Developing engineers has been the most rewarding work I’ve done:

🪜 Read how I rebuilt our career ladder with Engineering Managers.

🧠 I care a lot about building a good interview process. I run a fantastic interview: see my interviewing tips.

🏄 I love putting together onboarding programs and am constantly thinking about the new hire experience.

💡 I’ve also pitched and launched a 10% time policy.

🌟 Plus: leading teams, working with other leaders to define policy, mentoring junior engineers, etc.

Solving high-impact problems

I’m naturally a systems thinker and am magnetically attracted to big-ticket problems, technical or otherwise. I count rebuilding our software engineering career ladder as one example, but here are a couple of others:

🗜 DNA sequence data is huge. I created a lossy compression format 4% the size of its source file and ~28% the size of its competitor, and flew to Switzerland to present the results to the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health. Watch the talk or flip through the slides.

⏱ I dropped integration test runtimes from 55 minutes to 15 minutes by building a microservice to pool slow-to-create resources after hearing someone say “I guess I’ll raise the timeout to 20 minutes”.

⚙ Plus: more on the Projects page.

Teaching and learning

I love learning complex systems, exploring data to come up with ideas and test hypotheses, and teaching what I’ve learned.

🧬 Read my crash course on genomics for computer scientists!

🚀 Or maybe you’d prefer to learn the inner workings of options markets?

✍ Plus: plenty more on the Writing page.

Get in touch

I like to spend my time gaining understanding, building strategy, and getting everyone rowing in the same direction. It’s important that the work I do makes a tangible, positive difference in people’s lives.

Want to get in touch? Say hi: hussein@thisdomain.