Maturing as a software engineer

Looking back on my time as a developer, there are a lot of things I would have avoided doing if I had as much knowledge and maturity as I did now.

While I am grateful for the experiences and don’t regret them; I felt it would be a good idea to share these. These might motivate others or at least speed up their careers.

Here goes!

1. Patterns, patterns, patterns

When I take part in code reviews, I tend to look for recurring style patterns. Why? This helps to reduce the cognitive load on readers of the code (after all, code is written to be read).

I am  not advocating for bad software patterns rather having a plethora of ways for doing the same thing in a codebase creates confusion and productivity losses. How do you determine the ‘right’ pattern?

For example in JavaScript, there are several ways to create an array.

var a = [];

var a = new Array();

var a = new Array(3);

Having a haphazard mixture only takes away brain processing cycles. Rather, have your team decide on a style and stick to it.

By the way, the first style is the ‘expected’ and preferred approach although there might be use cases for the latter two.

Ever wonder why the Google codebase is rated to be easy to work with? Well, think about consistency and established patterns.

2. Break the big picture down and make incremental progress

Building and distributing the smallest software piece you can imagine requires more effort than you would think. It is much more efficient to break down the big picture into small chunks of work that can be completed in an hour or less. Such breakdowns make you more effective and help in understanding progress and forecasting completion times (which is a tricky problem to solve).

I used to break down only the code pieces before (which itself was an improvement over my earlier dive-into-code-and-figure-it-out-as-you-go approach). Nowadays, I try to take some time and reflect on the end product itself: its behaviour, look and feel and how users would interact with it.

For a typical software project, such road maps covers:

• Testing – unit tests, continuous integration,
• Documentation – extensibility guides, tooling
• Implementation
• Discoverability and Distribution – release targets, getting started articles
• Maintenance – handling bugs, user feedback etc

Sounds like too much work? Well, just focus on one small bit at a time and keep making progress.

3. Be lazy – start first on tasks with the largest impact/effort ratios

Two things matter: results and impact. There is no point in slaving for 20 hours to choose between blue and light blue if it has no impact on the users. Ditto for spending endless hours ‘arguing’ over what language should be used. Just choose the best usable one and deliver results.

My heuristic for tasks is thus:

• Does completing the task move me closer towards the big picture?
• Is this the easiest-to-achieve task with the biggest impact?

If so, I pick up that task and just do it – the goal is to maximize the impact/effort ratio.

Before I’d just stick to a task and spend endless hours on it even if it was something as trivial (and probably low-impact) as beautifying test scaffolding test output and elaborately designing test functions. Now? Common, my time is more valuable than that – I get the test functions right and try to get the coverage I want but won’t spend too much time once that is achieved and is readable for others.

Excessive polishing time can be spent on other more impactful pursuits like having fun with family or delivering high impact features.

4. Technical skills plateau

Sooner or later, you’ll get to the technical plateau. By that time, you’ll have so many successes under your belt and can detect potential pitfalls easily. Then, what next?

There are tons of ways to extend your impact and that is the way people become even better engineers. For example, I doubt if Anders Helsberg is still writing a lot of code, yet his ideas continue to empower and influence millions around the world.

Think about that, how do you scale your influence and make it possible to touch the lives of thousands of people? Are there engineering problems crippling your organization? Process pitfalls to improve with huge impact? Education ramp ups? There are always challenges to solve and problems to fix.

5. Choose career investments carefully

How would you set up an investment portfolio? Would you just go about investing in everything? Nope, you would evaluate the risks and benefits, consult experts and then invest in a select few areas while ignoring other areas.

You could spread out your risk by investing in a wide area but doing this excessively dilutes your returns. Conversely, investing in only company could be very risky too. Thus, it’s generally advised to spread  out your investment portfolio

Careers are investment portfolios. A typical career spans a long period ( upwards of 30 to 40 years) and shares some similarities with investments:

• technologies, frameworks etc -> investment options
• time -> funds

Just as you wouldn’t jump on every new fund, why would you do the same with your career? There is no harm in taking measured risks in careers but you should be strategic and know what your end goal is.

Every now and then a new framework pops up in the news. Before, I’d hop on the bandwagon and try figure it out. Nowadays? Well, if it really piques my interest, then I might spend some time learning about its core design principles and problem-solving approach.

If it neither solves any of my problems nor brings anything new to the table, then no thank you; I’d rather continue nurturing my current investment portfolio and hedging my bets.

Think about your bets and stick to them.

Conclusion

I am still learning and pray I continue. One thing that has struck me as being really critical is the will to try. We don’t know if something would work out or not however we can always try and then learn from the outcome (success or failure).

Don’t give up – continue learning and growing.