software engineering

From my experience and by observing other companies, I've concluded that the companies who do estimates and set deadlines regularly move slowly as compared to those who don't.

Before you mark your PR ready for review, always test it manually as well. It is not the QA’s job. QA's job is to assure quality. Not to test your code. It is the developer’s job to test their code and make sure it’s functional.

We should define a software engineer as someone who does rock-solid code reviews and writes code in their spare time. Not the other way around.

Think of release as a train that features/PRs/developers have to catch. Not as a tool to ship a fix or features. Set a cadence and release. Do not wait for that one last PR to get merged in the trunk to release.

A local gym membership management system has very different security requirements than Twitter. Analyze the game you are playing and act accordingly.

Most deadlines aren’t deadlines because a lot of them are breached and no one dies.

With only a job, the probability of making it big is equivalent to the inverse of DynamoDB's uptime.

If you ever feel like wanting to get a promotion, rethink your priorities until you no longer feel like that.

A developer in a startup would have a hard time clearing interviews in a big organization and fitting in and vice versa is equally true.

As Naval Ravikant said, 10000 iterations, not 10000 hours.

There is a difference in the following: Making games because you like playing games. Making games to make money. Making games for a professional career. Making games for fun. In your career, understand your skin in the game and what game you are playing. Work accordingly.

Doing DevOps will make you a better engineer. Period.

Understand the basics and no matter how much I stress this, someone is still going to get an AWS Associate Architect certificate and be completely clueless about how to convert a computer into a server that securely hosts an API to serve/receive data.

After all the effort in studying the pros and cons and viability of a solution, if you are still stuck on deciding between two techs, flip a coin. Decisiveness goes a long way. Ditto for life choices.

Be willing to help others especially when they are blocked. Unblock others first. They will like you and be willing to return the favors. Be reliable, trustworthy, and avoid gossiping. Give direct and honest feedback when solicited.

A note of caution here is that if your manager is a project manager, do not ever aspire to take that seat. In good software companies, I believe that role would disappear in near future. It’s as redundant as “ueue” in Queue.

Ideally, you or your organization should hire people no one has to manage.

If a candidate’s interview feedback is not a “HELL YES!!!”, err on the side of rejecting a good resource than hiring an average one.

You should have the ability to work according to the environment and expectations. A professional software engineer in a startup vs a corporate world can have very different and quite often contrasting skill sets.

Be a good writer and you will become a good human being and certainly a superior professional.