Tyler Walker

Revisiting my time in Iceland

I've recently been trying to learn more about Lightroom and photo editing and I've got a ton of stuff from my Iceland trip that I never ended up getting around to edit! I am following a few tutorials around color theory and color correction. This part

Leather working on February 2nd, 2025

My friends and I joked long enough about getting into leather working until it became a reality. I think it'll be super exciting to learn more about the craft and see what it takes to make some basic leather goods. My main motivation in taking these pictures is

My family room on February 2nd, 2025

I got my offer accepted for my house on February 2nd, 2022. I didn't realize until I started typing that out that means it's been almost 3 years of living here! The market was not very forgiving when I put my offer in and I was

Seattle Sunset on January 23rd

This was my first time taking out my new FujiFilm x100VI to a new spot! I'd ended up just going out for a quick drive but ended up catching this really beautiful sunset. One of the views I'm most inspired by in Washington is seeing the

Tyler's 2025 Goals

This year's goals are a lot more about maintaining the progress I've made so far. I don't have anything really ambitious like starting my own business or buying a house. I want to build on the work I've done before and really

Tyler's 2024 Goals (Revisited)

Since 2020 I've done at least two blog posts per year: one for my goals, and one re-visiting my goals. I have not made much of an effort to do blogging beyond that, and surprisingly: I'm okay with that! I enjoy this annual check-in to see

Tyler's 2024 Goals

This past year has probably been the most difficult and challenging year of my adult life. Navigating a challenging work environment with layoffs and shifting priorities as well as several personal and mental health challenges, this year was just rough. On a positive note, I fit in a bunch of

Tyler's 2023 Goals (Revisited)

Travel outside of the country Last December, I decided that I wanted to travel outside of the country and navigate all of the hoops that come with getting a passport and traveling to another country. There was no way I was ever going to go through the steps to get

Tyler's 2023 Goals

Travel outside of the country I've somehow made it 28 years on this planet without leaving this country. For the longest time, I avoided travelling internationally because the thought of getting a passport sounded so daunting. Back in December I was talking with a coworker about travelling and

Tyler's 2022 Goals (Revisited)

It's a little late, but better late than never! It's a bit of a bummer that my only posts in the last year have been my review and goals for 2022 but I refuse to feel bad about that! A lot of great things happened this

Tyler's 2022 Goals

I've thoroughly enjoyed my time off these past few weeks. The weeks leading up to the break were stressful and I was starting to get burned out (especially knowing how close I was to a 2-week break). In the last few years, I've either not taken

Tyler's 2021 Goals (Revisited)

This time of year, I try to look back and reflect on my goals from the last year and set new goals for the following year. I've have got to say though... this year is a pretty hard one to reflect on. I've hit pandemic burnout.

4 Problems with Software Interviews

Earlier this week I posted a tweet [https://twitter.com/airercode500/status/1439675990574202880?s=20] about my frustrations with software interviews. After seeing so many of the stories that were shared with me, I want to summarize my beef with software interviews. I do think that interviews should be challenging

My road to becoming a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft

I started my vacation last week with some awesome news: I got a promotion! In September I'll officially be a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. In the interest of my fading long-term memory, I want to document how I think I got to this moment. Namely, I want

What are pure functions?

If you've started to learn React or Redux recently you've probably heard of pure functions. In this post, I'll be breaking down pure functions to their most basic properties and providing some advice for testing. Back to Basics One of the first functions people

What I learned as a mentor for Microsoft's Neurodiversity Hiring Program

I'm a firm believer that all mentor/mentee relationships should be bidirectional. As good as it makes me feel to help someone along in the early parts of their career, I learn a lot about technology & leadership by forming connections with people I'd otherwise probably never meet.

3 Ways Event Storming Helps Build Enterprise Software

In the last few months my organization has made move towards describing our problem space using Domain Driven Design. We build enterprise software that powers Microsoft's global computer networking services. In this space we use a hybrid of vendor appliances and homegrown software solution to provide a better

How 'water batteries' could make solar power more practical at scale

As I was wandering around the grocery store chatting with my friend Micah the other day, she started explaining this really interesting concept about "water batteries"; and how they could help the adoption of solar technology. One of the biggest problems with solar reliance is the fact that

Digital First Design: Engineering Without Whiteboards

My main interest in this paradigm isn't necessarily around pandemic working conditions, but what a hybrid working model is going to look like for the folks who continue remote work as some of their peers return to the office.

The 4 States of Engineering Teams

As I make my way through An Elegant Puzzle [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/an-elegant-puzzle-book-review/] I'm going to be documenting some of my thoughts and reactions. Today's is around what Will Larson calls "The Four States of a Team". In the book, he prescribes system

Tyler's 2021 Goals

Given that I just spent the last hour or so reflecting on my last year of goals, I want to keep these fairly brief. I've noticed a pattern in my writing is that I write a lot for the first few paragraphs and then it drops off. This

Tyler's 2020 Goals (Revisited)

I did this same kind of retrospective last year [https://tyler-walker.ghost.io/revisiting-2019-goals/] as a retrospective following the previous year's New Year's resolutions. Obviously, when I set my resolutions in December of 2019 I had no idea what was in store for me. Despite the

Let's stop solving conflict by "putting it to a vote"

One of the most important skills I've learned over the past few years is how to deal with conflict at work. If you're working with a lot of bright and passionate people there are bound to be profound disagreements; especially around group decision making. I don&

Avoid committing secrets by ignoring tracked files in Git

The Problem Secrets are things like API keys, user credentials, and certificates that will implicitly allow someone access to another platform or service. My team has a local.settings.json file in our repository that contains some secrets that allow us to call dependent services. In order to successfully run

Why I don't contribute to Open Source Software

I've had a few false starts contributing to OSS by finding a new-to-me project, skimming through their issues and trying to find an easy PR to write.