Software project planning is extremely difficult. In every step of the process—design, build, test, release—a multitude of things will go wrong. For all the senior engineers, team leads, and engineering managers embarking on a challenging software project, here is a cheat sheet of activities to ensure your work runs as…
Software
Microservices are nothing new. After being deployed successfully by mega-companies like Netflix, many growing engineering organizations gravitate towards this architecture as an aspirational symbol of success. This journey is known to many as the “monolith to microservices” migration. A few companies (Spotify) have the clairvoyance to adopt microservices from the…
1-1s are core to management. Ad-hoc feedback delivery, bi-weekly check-ins with your directs, monthly meetings with your skip-levels, annual performance reviews. Their use cases are well-defined and well-understood. 1-1-1s, on the other hand, can be much more interesting. Significant progress can be made if you’re able to get the three…
As a Junior IC How comfortable am I developing code and debugging issues? Could I give a presentation about my team? Do I know who to contact if I’m not sure how to solve a problem (besides my mentor)? Did I release a project end-to-end that required me to do…
Check out my original post on Staff Software Engineer Responsibilities! As a Staff Software Engineer, one of your hardest challenges is to influence without authority. If your position doesn’t hold authority by default, then your best bet is to align with it. This topic was inspired by an insightful quote…
This post’s goal is to provide you with a deeper intuition behind two of the most common software messaging patterns—queues vs. pub/sub. This is a deep topic which deserves thoughtful attention when designing software. This article is structured in three parts: Develop an intuition for messaging, queues, and pub-sub through…
“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…
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…
“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.”
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…