11–20 of 73 posts
TDD is both a good practice and a great psychological boost.
The biggest one I'd recommend is "find a mentor." And I don't mean a manager (unless you're going on that path), but rather a technical leader that you can meet with once a week to month whose opinion you value and can provide you honest feedback on your work. You should plan to drive these meetings; count on them only to show up, drink coffee, and answer your questions. If it is not your most valuable hour of the we…
The biggest one I'd recommend is "find a mentor." And I don't mean a manager (unless you're going on that path), but rather a technical leader that you can meet with once a week to month whose opinion you value and can provide you honest feedback on your work. You should plan to drive these meetings; count on them only to show up, drink coffee, and answer your questions. If it is not your most valuable hour of the we…
I would fault some of the points listed, like "Embrace Unit Testing", to a failure of Software Engineering as a discipline. Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Doctors, etc. all have bodies of knowledge. We, as an industry and discipline, have no real body of knowledge. Do Doctors have the ability to make up procedure on the operating table? Why is it, then, that we don't have standard practices,…
The biggest one I'd recommend is "find a mentor." And I don't mean a manager (unless you're going on that path), but rather a technical leader that you can meet with once a week to month whose opinion you value and can provide you honest feedback on your work. You should plan to drive these meetings; count on them only to show up, drink coffee, and answer your questions. If it is not your most valuable hour of the we…
I would fault some of the points listed, like "Embrace Unit Testing", to a failure of Software Engineering as a discipline. Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Doctors, etc. all have bodies of knowledge. We, as an industry and discipline, have no real body of knowledge. Do Doctors have the ability to make up procedure on the operating table? Why is it, then, that we don't have standard practices,…
They are part of the curriculum in a good SE degree. There is a SWEBOK. http://www.computer.org/portal/web/swebok
i would summarize it as: be smart constantly learn find people that are better than you.
but then again, most "seniors" probably never did any of the aforementioned. i met an ex oxford(or cambridge) cs prof who's now doing his own startup a while back.
The main thing that struck me was that how willing he was to accept advice, even though he tought one of the first cs courses in the uk.
This is only tangentially related: I work a relatively big startup and I'm not not in the technical side of the company. A piece of "simple"* software was built and deployed about 4 months ago, it was a week of one developers time start to finish. Ever since deployment there has been bug after bug after bug, every time they fix one bug they break something else. This is an extremely simple system that should (in my e…
If it's closer to the second, it could signify more of a failure of process than a failure of engineering if engineers are being pushed to release quickly at the expense of planning, time for refactoring, qa, unit tests, etc. That "this should be easy, why's it taking so long??!" attitude can create a toxic environment if it's coming from people who don't understand the issues involved.