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Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

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Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just use headerdoc-type stuff. Been doing it for decades. It works very well, and doesn't really add any overhead to my work. I write about how I do documentation here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/leaving-a-legacy/ It's a long read, because it's a big topic.

That's useful, but only covers documenting the code, and API usage. Depending on the project, various other documents may be required, e.g. installation guide, user guide, operations manual, architecture diagrams, networking diagrams, module/component diagrams, information flow diagrams, high-level design, low-level design, docs at various "views" (such as "business view", "information view", "technology view"), desi…

Absolutely. I do those, as well. Here's a rather more intense example: https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba...

I'm actually in the middle of using Postman to generate a more "modern" inline docset for a new engineer that is coming into a project that uses that server.

But I also like to keep docs to a bare minimum, as they become what I term "concrete galoshes": https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/concrete-galoshes/

We need to be very careful, as the docs can prevent agility, in a big way.

I find that if I can keep the docs pinned to the code, itself, as much as possible, it helps to keep some flexibility.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#142

>I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so l…

I would do "full-stack" over a decade ago, when there was less of the notion of "front-end engineer" (which still sound a bit ridiculous to me) - the front-end was mostly HTML and CSS. It was a good experience, to go from requirements gathering to the database schema and back to presentation - it helped me see the whole picture.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#143
post #54
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people in the industry are paid based on the potential value they can create (whether real or not), knowing many things or understanding fancy technologies matters little if one can't put them to use for the benefit of the company.

I've helped found multi-million dollar companies that I left before I could "cash out" because they were desktop based companies working with technology I considered growing stale and I wanted to switch to the web. Now I'm doing the same thing with another company with the web, expect I'm handling everything as a sole-engineer, full stack. Here I'm dealing with creating an Angular application to replace an aging ASP.…

It seems to like you are refactoring an existing application, I'm personally in the middle of something similar but rather than doing it solo, I'm trying to engage other Dev's, grab their interests by demoing the new architecture and see if I can get a few more hands on this work.

I'm doing all of this extra work because I think the best way to create value for a company is to make it easy for other/new developers to jump in to the project and contribute something of value quickly. My refactoring would have failed completely if other Dev's are not able to contribute the new code

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#144
post #3

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.) I agree but think it is more than just _documentation_: effectively communicating ideas through text was one o…

The first thing to learn is that there are four types of documentation: learning-oriented tutorials goal-oriented how-to guides understanding-oriented explanations or discussions information-oriented reference material https://www.writethedocs.org/videos/eu/2017/the-four-kinds-o...

Agree with the sibling comment, but a starting point is also just to write docs for your future self, which is usually going to be type 3 or 4. Most of us who have been programming for a few years have had the experience of being mystified by something we ourselves wrote in the past, so it eventually becomes fairly straightforward to predict what kinds of things future-me will need a hand in piecing back together.

And it turns out those kinds of docs are pretty useful to my colleagues in piecing it together also.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#145
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. Something bizarre I have noticed though in junior-almost-senior engineers is that they pride themselves in obfuscating and writing "highly complex" logic, with no documentation. It's almost like they are demonstrating their new abilities in the worst way possible. I have been dealing with one of these engineers recently, and they have expressed to me that they love writing because it's so terse. It's been a poi…

i was debugging some very terse, elegant, and dense code. i added a bunch of logging throughout to understand what was going wrong. someone then removed all of my logging because it was ugly. and then had to put it all back in when another bug was coming from the same terse beautiful code.

Should've put it into a branch and added an one-line comment to that effect to the master.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#148
post #143
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've helped found multi-million dollar companies that I left before I could "cash out" because they were desktop based companies working with technology I considered growing stale and I wanted to switch to the web. Now I'm doing the same thing with another company with the web, expect I'm handling everything as a sole-engineer, full stack. Here I'm dealing with creating an Angular application to replace an aging ASP.…

It seems to like you are refactoring an existing application, I'm personally in the middle of something similar but rather than doing it solo, I'm trying to engage other Dev's, grab their interests by demoing the new architecture and see if I can get a few more hands on this work. I'm doing all of this extra work because I think the best way to create value for a company is to make it easy for other/new developers to…

> It seems to like you are refactoring an existing application, I'm personally in the middle of something similar but rather than doing it solo, I'm trying to engage other Dev's, grab their interests by demoing the new architecture and see if I can get a few more hands on this work.

The problem is they literally can't afford it. They looked at "near shoring" companies but they were too expensive. They said we got a quote for developers from another country who will do this work for $20/hour.

I explained that this has the potential of ruining a green-field project that absolutely needs to be architected and coded properly from the ground-up.

If we go that route the best I can do is enforce code standards and handle every pull-request.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#149

> When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it. This is the saddest. One more soul taken by the shrinking of the hacker culture.

Being the best coder doesn’t make customers want your product. So at a certain point, I got over coding. I am now more interested in business and product managements.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's useful, but only covers documenting the code, and API usage. Depending on the project, various other documents may be required, e.g. installation guide, user guide, operations manual, architecture diagrams, networking diagrams, module/component diagrams, information flow diagrams, high-level design, low-level design, docs at various "views" (such as "business view", "information view", "technology view"), desi…

Absolutely. I do those, as well. Here's a rather more intense example: https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba... I'm actually in the middle of using Postman to generate a more "modern" inline docset for a new engineer that is coming into a project that uses that server. But I also like to keep docs to a bare minimum, as they become what I term "concrete galoshes": https://littlegreenviper.com/mi…

Ah nice, it's refreshing to see that level of documentation for an OSS project, even if it started as a commercial project.

Totally agree about not having too much documentation - sometimes outdated documentations is worse than no documentation at all.

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