Don't Break Prod

Often one of the last steps of a major project is "Write Documentation".

When looking for the next thing to work on it can be easy to stay in your comfort zone, working in areas of the codebase that you're comfortable in or with technologies that you know well.

Schedules have a bad habit of starting on Mondays and wrapping up at the end of the week.

When working on a team, the more everybody understands what you're thinking and what you're doing the better.

You know that person on your team who does a great job of making sure everybody's code confirms to conventions (you have conventions, right?)

This one can be hard.

Writing software is full of frustrations.

You just pushed some code that really screwed things up.

There seems to be a lot of talk about burnout in the tech industry; software engineers working themselves into the ground then quitting their jobs to become yoga instructors or coffee roasters or just take a year off to try to remember why they enjoyed pr…

If you don't know something, there's a good chance that others don't know it too, so it can often be useful to ask questions in public situations.

As you get more comfortable with your tools (languages, frameworks, etc.) it can be tempting to come up with the cleverest solutions possible.

Following up from the previous post about talking to people who intimidate you, you should also have some people that you feel very comfortable bringing unpolished thoughts to.

No matter how good you are there is probably someone in your field that intimidates you to some degree.

When you're working on a bug your goal is to figure out why things aren't working as you'd expect them to be (and hopefully correct this issue).

This is simple advice that anybody doing potentially frustrating work needs to hear sometimes.

This is, perhaps, the evil twin of Know How to Confirm It Works.

Don't think of yourself as a Javascript Developer or a Ruby Developer or a Python developer.

This is a simple one.

When you have a large project to get into it can sometimes take a lot of activation energy to really get into it.

You've just finished building a new feature and you're ready to launch.

When it comes time to do performance reviews you will be asked to provide some sort of write up about what you actually did.

Odds are there is more than just engineering in your organization.

When getting into a new feature or bug fix or project, start writing things down.

For many software engineers, most day to day work is adding features or fixing bugs in an exiting application.

This could mean pairing with people or shadowing people or even watching people who stream their coding sessions.

It's going to suck but you will break something important.