software engineering 👩‍💻 💯

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

Julia Evans once said "behind every best practice is a horror story." If you don't understand a Best Practice, look for the horror story that inspired it. It might make the best practice make sense. It might turn out to be something that's completely irrelevant to you, and then you can feel comfortable doing a different practice instead.

Learn to deal with pressure

When you're in a real interview the world changes: You're locked in a cage with a lion. Every heartbeat is a gorilla bashing against the walls. Your mental gears gunk up as your body goes into fight or flight mode. Your clammy hands struggle to write half legible code on the white board. A threat hides behind every shado... See more

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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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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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.

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

Anyone who’s spent a few months at a sizable tech company can tell you that a lot of software seems to exist primarily because companies have hired people to write and maintain them. In some ways, the software serves not the business, but the people who have written it, and then those who need to maintain it. This is stupid, but also very, very tru... See more

Don’t underestimate the value of digging into history to investigate some bugs

I’ve always been pretty good at debugging weird issues, with the usual toolkit of println and the debugger. So I never really looked at git much to figure out the history of a bug. But for some bugs it’s crucial.

I recently had an issue with my server where it was leaking... See more

Spending time sharpening the axe is almost always worth it

You’re going to be renaming things, going to type definitions, finding references, etc a lot ; you should be fast at this. You should know all the major shortcuts in your editor. You should be a confident and fast typist. You should know your OS well. You should be proficient in the shell. ... See more