Software Engineering

When a test fails, you should be able to begin investigation with nothing more than the test’s name and its failure messages —no need to add more information and rerun the test.

Effective use of unit test frameworks and assertion libraries (JUnit, Truth, pytest, GoogleTest, etc.) serves two important purposes. Firstly, the more precisely we express... See more

Shipping to production

Before shipping to production, we think about all the different artifacts that might be affected by a new feature.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of things we ask ourselves:

• Does the API need to be updated?


• Is the OpenAPI spec up to date now?


• Have we released all the official SDKs?


• Do we need to write a Changelog post to announce

... See more

How to build this skill:

• Maximize what you can do on your own: by ruthlessly prioritizing your time, pushing back on activities that have small ROI, and focusing on areas where your input is crucial; for engineers, it often means less coding (if more junior people can do that piece of coding).


• How you can maximize what you can do through others:

... See more

Use nested objects for future extensibility

A follow on from the previous tip: try to logically group fields together. The following:

customer.address = {

line1: "Main Street 123",

city: "San Francisco",

postal_code: "12345"

};

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is much cleaner than:

customer.address_line1 = "Main street 123";

customer.address_city... See more

To make life for developers easier, be explicit in what exactly is being returned. In the Stripe API, we have an object field in the response that makes it abundantly clear what we’re working with. For example, the API route

/v1/customers/:customer/payment_methods/:payment_method

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returns a PaymentMethod... See more

Build & Deployments

Our build process starts by pushing changes to a repository on GitHub. When code is pushed to a repository through a pull request, it triggers a job to build the changes made to the branch and deploy them in isolation. This worklow happens interactively within the pull request, where the author has visibility of all steps.

Some... See more

Before you start working, figure out:

1. What does the business want?


2. Which criteria should I fulfill to call my work “good”?


3. What do I need to do to complete this particular task?

After you’ve finished your work, check:

4. Did I miss anything?

Netflix created a scoring system from 0 to 100 that assigns a priority to a request, with 0 being the highest priority and 100 being the lowest priority.

The score was based on 4 dimensions

Functionality - What functionality gets impacted if this request gets throttled? Is it important to the user experience? For example, if logging-related requests... See more

We ship often

Shipping early is not enough. We also need to keep shipping tiny iterations daily instead of waiting months to ship something big.

Having a strong sense of urgency , and making hard decisions fast is how we enable that process. Our sprints only last 1 week and are quite short when compared to the rest of the industry - this is by... See more