Hey, my name is Hasina Ambinintsoa.
I am a software engineer with 10 years in the industry. I mostly like working with TypeScript, Ruby on Rails, React and Vue.js. I use Python for various things, though more for personal quests. I’m exploring Go right now with my interest in its performance.
Born and raised in Madagascar, I have been living and working in France (Île-de-France) for the past 4 years. I'm open to relocating for the right opportunity, but as of now, I'll be staying here for the foreseeable future.
My experience gave me skills in both back-end and front-end development, plus a product mindset from my years as a project manager. I’m leaning a bit front-end though. I think it’s more complex and interesting than people give it credit for.
When I'm not coding, I'm reviving my old passion for drawing and design.
Difficult to figure out which questions are really essential, so I gathered some below. If you still have any, feel free to email me.
They call me Hasina. I promise you it’s a guy’s name in my home country. lol. On how it’s pronounced, you can try “Ha-seen” but you can pronounce it however you like, I generally have no issue knowing it’s me.
It would. And I won't pretend otherwise.
It's THE place to be for visibility. And I'm still planning to use the platform to showcase my work in progress and my results.
But there’s more to it than that. I like control: a personal website lets me experiment with original animations and interactive elements, which I can't do on LinkedIn.
It also helps to have a place that isn't competing with the feed. At the time of writing, a study pointed out that 30% of short-form and 41% of long-form content on LinkedIn is fully AI-generated. I'll be honest, I'd rather my writing not be graded on that curve.
Yes, I'm intentional about it.
On AI: At first I used AI a lot, for rewording text and for automatic translation. It helped me get the website off the ground, but the content quality was subpar. Nowadays, I just write basically everything by hand in two languages. Then I use AI to fix the grammar, challenge my point of view and suggest optional improvements. It has the side effect of putting more time into each piece, but I’m okay with that.
On the topics to cover: They will mostly be around my building in public, technical discussions (trying to stay away from work gossip) and my learnings. I’m doing my best to share my own authentic opinions and not just be an echo.
On politics and religion: Well, I’m not apolitical, but I’m not an activist either. I WILL inevitably cover some of that ground, but we’ll be talking about the ideas, not the individuals. My interests remain around how laws, compliance and policies influence the tech industry.
A bit of lore about myself: I got wrecked in an interview because I had never taken the time to self-reflect on this. I'm writing this out of the trauma from that interview:
Communication: Nothing dooms a project more than a lack of it. Details in another question below.
Responsibility: I thrive most when I'm given responsibility and autonomy. I like to have a little more context and access than my direct line of work strictly requires. For example, if I'm working on the front-end, I think it's within the realm of reasonable for me to have access to the database. That way I don't have to wait on the back-end to find out whether a field exists or how values get saved. From experience, it helps a lot and speeds things up.
Compensation: Another bit of lore: I ran a small business before and I know what it's like to try to minimize expenses to keep a business afloat, so I have empathy for hard-working companies trying to turn a profit. I always tried to pay people above market rate to motivate them. That said, I do get a little down when I feel I'm not being fairly compensated. On my side, I try to be worth it. I keep upskilling, as I don't think it's fair to expect great pay for mediocre work.
There are many other things we could talk about, but if we nail those three, I won't have much to complain about. I could have said “quality”, but that topic is too broad to make a single statement on.
French comes from my education back home. English I mostly picked up through natural exposure over the years, then sharpened at Ingedata. These days I switch between the two without thinking much about it.
Good question! I already answered part of it a couple of questions above, but let me be more thorough here:
Communication: I always try to be as clear as possible. If things are unclear, I'll sort them out, and I'll run my approach by you when it needs validation. I always try my best to update the people I report to before they feel the need to ask. If something changes that impacts the deadline, you'd likely want to be informed as soon as possible, not the evening before D-day.
Quality and pragmatism: I write tests wherever I can. I always try to follow the established work policies, but I do question them when something feels inefficient. On a tight deadline, assuming we can't negotiate the scope of the delivery, what I find sensible is to do what works but always create a ticket for a second pass later: refactoring and more tests.
Humanity: I don't believe a company is a family (shocking, I know!). But I do believe, to some extent, that we're teammates. Some of us love our jobs, some of us are just paying the bills. Either way, it helps if kindness is our default state. A little bit of camaraderie doesn't hurt, though everyone has their boundaries. I always try to separate the person from the action, as much as is humanly possible. Though, on rare occasions, it's not possible.
Disagree and commit: I can explain it but I think others already did the work for me. That said, I value a company that lets its employees speak up on a given issue. But once leadership has settled on a direction, I roll up my sleeves and do the work accordingly, even if I don't agree. I'm never the one who'll say "I told you so" when things go wrong because my idea did not get picked up. If it turns out they were wrong, we fix it together. But if something really is crucial and non-negotiable for me, a proper and peaceful departure is better than bitterness.
My personality: I love writing. I listen a lot (I’m the therapist guy in my friend group). I don’t speak much in a huge crowd, but I like speaking in small groups of five. I always make jokes that are dumb enough to make me the only one who laughs. I look shy, but I’m not shy. I actually have no issue doing a demo in front of a packed audience. My weakness may be that, although I always speak my mind at work, if I’m not the lead I usually don’t have the same energy for defending my views. I’m working on that right now.
Well, I’ll say my feelings about it are nuanced.
According to a report from Forbes, five days a week in the office burns people out faster. Which I agree with. The same piece also reports that full remote tends to lower productivity by around 8% to 19%. Which I also agree with: there's more coordination overhead and more meetings eating into the actual work time. But beyond that, my opinion is that your setup at home matters, and so does your attitude toward remote.
Yes, but what is my conclusion, you may ask! I definitely lean toward hybrid remote. Apart from the other benefits, seeing your colleagues once in a while is genuinely good for you. Full remote does work when a company is very intentional about it, not when it's just trying to save money (I've seen that happen).
I'm working full time right now, but I'm open to interesting opportunities. If you have something in mind, you can talk to me.
Nice ref! Well, my aim is to become REALLY good. The definition of "good" varies a lot from person to person, so I wrote a blog entry to define what it means for me.