David Xiang

20 Micro-Habits Of High-Impact Software Engineers

by dxiang 2021-07-18

“The 25 Micro-Habits of High-Impact Managers” is a wonderful article highlighting wisdom from various managers across various industries. The article also reinforces an important universal idea—the details always matter. I subscribe to this idea and believe it can be easily re-applied to individual contribution.

At any given company, the criteria for promotion can be bland and frustratingly opaque—consistently deliver value turns into create impact for your team, which quickly evolves into create impact for multiple teams, and somehow leads to create impact for the entire company and drive its future. These large expectations are difficult to break down. It’s easier to start with the details (“micro-habits” if you will) and see where that takes you.

Before continuing, I highly recommend reading, “On Being A Senior Engineer“, which provides a holistic set of expectations on what it means to be “senior.” With these expectations in mind, the following is an opinionated list of micro-habits exhibited by high-impact software engineers. I’ve broken them down into 4 themes, each with 5 habits.

Leadership & Culture
Execution
Scope & Complexity
Communication

Management Software

6-Step Guide For Software Engineering Decision-Making

by dxiang 2021-06-16

Software engineering decision-making is a stressful and time-consuming process. When the stakes are high, you will be met with opinionated programmers, insurmountable organizational constraints, and unfortunate baggage from old projects. Consensus is difficult.

In a previous post, “Staff Software Engineer Responsibilities“, I mention that the act of “Transforming Competing Opinions Into Decisions” as one of a Staff Engineer’s primary responsibilities. I note that prolonged technical debates are a risk for organizations and that Staff Engineers must “push through friction” in order to arrive at decisions. However, once you feel the friction, it’s never clear how you’re supposed to push through it.

This article presents a generalizable 6-step outline to help engineers drive consensus. This is a set of heuristics, not an algorithm.

Software

What Is A Runtime Environment?

by dxiang 2021-02-26

“Runtime” and “Runtime Environment” are some of the most overloaded terms in software development. It’s confusing for everyone; this word means many different things in many different contexts. This post’s goal is to provide you with an intuition behind the many use-cases of “runtime.”

Management Software

Software Engineering Culture Metrics

by dxiang 2021-02-10

Company culture. Extremely important, impossible to define.

Impossible to define doesn’t mean impossible to understand. A surface-level understanding of culture is available via Glassdoor and company onboarding documents. However, a deep understanding of culture is only available via experience.

This article focuses on a set of values often associated with software engineering culture. Instead of the discussing the values themselves, I discuss the activities which measure them.

Management Software

Staff Software Engineer Responsibilities

by dxiang 2021-01-19

The path of the Staff Software Engineer represents the career progression of a technologist. Senior Engineer leads to Staff Engineer which leads to Principal Engineer which hopefully leads to a comfortable retirement. Unfortunately, Staff Software Engineer responsibilities are often poorly defined by management. The goal of this article is to give clarity to these responsibilities so aspiring Staff Engineers—and their managers—can perform their jobs more effectively.

Software

Kafka As A Database? Yes Or No

by dxiang 2021-01-10

I recently read through a Hacker News thread discussing the article “Kafka Is Not A Database”, by Arjun Narayan and George Fraser. The opinions behind this topic are fascinating and I enjoyed sifting through comments from both sides of the table. For the purposes of this post, I’ve labeled these two broad groups of thoughts as Team Blue and Team Red.

Team Blue believes that Kafka, a popular streaming platform, has the potential to be the source-of-truth for your data—replacing one of the key responsibilities of conventional databases.

Team Red strongly disagrees.

The following is high-level summary of these opinions.

Software

Software Engineer Vs Programmer

by dxiang 2020-12-31

The difference between the titles Software Engineer vs Programmer vs Hacker vs {other_coding_title} is rooted in a person’s ideals. This difference is succinctly summarized in the wonderful article 3 Tribes of Programming, where the author buckets programmers into three distinct “tribes”:

You are a poet and a mathematician. Programming is your poetry
You are a hacker. You make hardware dance to your tune
You are a maker. You build things for people to use
josephg.com

The author asserts that all coders lean towards one of three tribes—The Poet, The Hacker, or The Maker. Even though a stark contrast is made to separate these groups, these tribes are not mutually exclusive—many programmers are Makers by day, Hackers by night, and aspiring Poets by weekend.

Software Engineer vs Programmer is a false dichotomy I’ve created to separate Makers from Non-Makers. I believe this separation to be relevant because the majority of us are Makers by profession—myself included. Without a doubt, the most accessible path to make a career out of code is the path of the Maker, or the Software Engineer.

If the Maker represents the Software Engineer, who is the Programmer? These are the Hackers and the Poets. These are the coders that code for the raw love of computing, the people who rightfully put the science in computer science. You’ll find these “purist” programmings developing new languages, tweaking assembly, and occasionally scoffing at the work of Makers. Pursuing a career as a Programmer will not be as accessible as pursuing a career as a Software Engineer.

Practically speaking however, this kind of separation is not helpful; everyone writes code for their own reasons. Since the majority of us are Makers, let’s dive into what’s actually important for a Maker to focus on.

Management Software

The Debugger’s Mindset

by dxiang 2020-08-18

Debugging is a critical skill. More important than the skill is the mindset. The debugger’s mindset is the attitude that you must always understand the why behind a problem; any ambiguities or unknowns are unacceptable. This mindset has the potential to carry you from debugging small functions to solving difficult organizational issues.