Kate Matsudaira

I read an interesting article “Design Patterns for Managing Up” that discusses four challenging situations at work and approaches to resolve them. It turns out that the author is technologist Kate Matsudaira, previously working at Microsoft, Amazon, and several startups. Kate is currently a director of engineering at Google.

Her personal blog is full of great articles and is well worth reading, because Kate has a unique combination of good technical knowledge and great management skills. I particularly liked her articles on resolving conflicts and managing people and teams. Kate’s personal story is inspiring. She also shares a very comprehensive list of interview questions for CS jobs. From this list I liked converting BST to ordered array, when is a hash map a poor data choice and given the following variables: time, budget, customer happiness and best practices, explain which are the most important in a project.

There are several talks by Kate available online, concentrating on personal growth at work and leadership. I suggest you start with the “Leveling Up” talk that is motivating and fun. Speaking of leadership,
Lighthouse has a nice interview with her.

Kate’s Twitter account seems to be updated regularly and you may want to start 2019 with the planning tools she links to.

I love it when the Internet takes me on a tour like this. I start from an article by an unknown person on Hacker News, liking the article and finding out more articles by the author, all the way to her life story on her blog and seeing that she went to Harvey Mudd College on her LinkedIn profile. Coming back to a game theme from Kate’s talk, it’s like playing different levels in a game:-)