software engineering 👩‍💻 💯

When working on a team, you should usually ask the question

There’s a spectrum of “trying to figure out everything for yourself” to “bugging your coworkers with every little question”, and I think most people starting their careers are too far on the former side. There’s always someone around that has been in the codebase longer, or knows technolog... See more

If you can’t easily explain why something is difficult, then it’s incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing

My favorite manager in my career had a habit of pressing me when I would claim something was difficult to implement. Often his response was something along the lines of “isn’t this just a matter of sending up X when we Y”, or ... See more

At some point you will discover the Right Way to program, the thing which makes this all make sense , and you'll be convinced that the whole field would be so much better off if everybody else programmed the Right Way, too. For me the Right Way was test-driven development; for you it might be functional programming, lisp, formal methods or one of a

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You've probably heard the advice that software as a field is changing all the time , and that you shouldn't get swept up in the framework treadmill, just focus on learning fundamental skills. This is a true, but doesn't explain the "why". For structural reasons, information in software propagates really quickly. This is due to a lot of factors (int

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Try to solve bugs one layer deeper

Imagine you have a React component in a dashboard, that deals with a User object retrieved from state, of the currently logged in user. You see a bug report in Sentry, where user was null during render. You could add a quick if (!user) return null . Or you could investigate a bit more, and find that your logout fu... See more

If you’re lucky, you will have many challenging moments in your career. Moments when you only understand a portion of the problem in front of you, when you know you’ll have to try a few things to see what works, when you aren’t fully confident that you can do the job. We’re lucky to have these moments because that’s how we grow. By pushing outside ... See more

Remembering that the tech industry is being built by people just figuring things out on the fly isn’t just a way to avoid stress; it’s become one of the most empowering bits of advice I can imagine. Because if all those people out there have changed the world while not knowing what they were doing…so can I.

This pattern (set up, do work, clean up) is common across many different problem domains, so Python has a language feature to help with it. Context managers, defined using the with keyword, manage the setup and cleanup processes. Python's file objects support them, as do most database libraries.