Accelerate your software engineering career by understanding adjacent layers.

As a developer you are always between something. If you work on UI, you are between the user and the rest of your application. If you work on web services or APIs, you are between the web framework and a database, a library, or another service. Your executable code is between the compiler and the runtime (JVM/CLR) or CPU.

While it’s possible to work just in your area, ignoring what’s above and below you is not a good long-term strategy. Knowing at least a little about adjacent layers is invaluable because it:

makes debugging “weird” issues easier
can help prevent mistakes made due to incorrect assumptions
allows choosing more optimal design choices

How can you learn about adjacent layers? Here are a few ideas:

If you are using a popular framework, a library, or a product like a database there should already be a lot of documentation readily available
In case of open-source projects you can simply check out the code
For libraries or services created in-house you can talk to the team who built them or read the code
You can also look at the code for JavaScript (or TypeScript) libraries because they ship as code. Minification and uglification can make it challenging
If you don’t have access to code and you’re working with languages like C# or Java, you can use decompilers that do a decent job generating code from the IL/bytecode
Your last resort is looking at or debugging the assembly, but this is hard in general and your mileage may vary.

Once you get a good grasp of your adjacent layers you can take it further and understand layers your code doesn’t directly interact with. Keep doing this and soon you will be one of only few people who understands the entire stack.

Accelerate your software engineering career by tracking your work

Your manager doesn’t know what you’re doing. They do know about things you should be doing they care about but you’re doing much more than that. You’re probably doing much more than even you think you’re doing. So, if even you don’t know what you’re doing why would you expect your manager to know this?

To know what you’re doing you need to track your work. The reason to do this is to be able to easily answer the following questions:

What am I doing? – helps confirm you’re working on the right things
What am I not doing? – helps ensure you’re not dropping the ball on important work
What I’ve accomplished this year/half/quarter? – makes all career, performance review and promotion discussions much easier

There are many ways to track work. You’ll need to find what works for you. I do it in a very simple way. Each year I create a Google doc for tracking my work for the given year. It has two sections:

What I’ve completed
A weekly list of tasks or projects I need to work on

Each Monday morning I spend 10-15 minutes to update this doc. I go over last week’s work items and move completed ones to the ‘completed’ section. I strikethrough work items that are no longer needed or I decided not to do. I copy the remaining ones as this week’s tasks. Finally, if there is any new work, I add it.

I attach artifacts to most items in the ‘completed’ section. They are a tool I or my manager can use to showcase my work and support my career related discussions. Here are examples of what I include:

Links to design docs, posts, roll out plans, etc.
References to diffs where I influenced the design or prevented serious issues
Other teams’ projects I helped unblock
Details about why something I did was hard

There is no one correct answer as to what granularity to track the completed items at. I found including smaller work items is worthwhile. Some of them are too small to matter by themselves but they add up. The secret is to group them in coherent themes. For instance, adding a couple tests will not get you to the next level but if you have done this multiple times you might have significantly increased the test coverage for your team or product which could be an additional argument to support your promotion.

Starting to track my work was one of the best things I’ve done for my career. It takes just a few minutes per week but gives me the clarity I need and saves me a ton of time during performance reviews. If you’re not tracking your work, I strongly encourage you to start.

Accelerate your software engineering career by fixing something every week.

We, software engineers, are so used to living in pain that we stopped noticing it. We die a death by a thousand papercuts every day only to start fresh the next day. Flaky tests, broken builds, workarounds, outdated documentation is our daily bread. We live with all of that forgetting how much it costs.

Imagine an annoying issue you need to spend a few minutes on every week. Now, multiply this time by the number of people on your team – likely, they all are facing this issue. I also bet this is not the only “small” issue you and your team have. If you add all this up it may turn out that your team could use another engineer whose full-time job is just to deal with all these annoyances.

With time, it only gets worse because small issues tend to grow. One flaky test leads to a flaky suite and soon no one can tell what the quality of the product is. A convoluted function is patched multiple times without anyone really understanding it to the point when everyone prays that they don’t have to touch it. Missing test coverage results in multiple bugs reported by users.

The interesting thing is – most small issues don’t take a lot of time to fix. You yourself (i.e., not counting your team) may be able to recoup the time invested in a couple of weeks.

There are many examples of the positive impact of taking care of a small issue. Here is just a handful examples from my experience:

Fixing an acknowledged bug deprioritized consistently from release to release made lives of some users better (and discussing the bug repeatedly took more time than just fixing it)
Refactoring code that was incomprehensible made adding a new feature easier and faster
Updating an internal wiki helped save time spent on answering the same question again and again
A “flaky” test was a result of a product bug that could have serious consequences
Tuning a noisy alert prevented from waking up a team member who was on-call in the middle of the night

But wait, there is more! If you keep doing this regularly (a weekly cadence worked best for me) people will notice. Your team members may even start doing the same! And if they don’t, it will at least make it harder for them to make things worse – for example, it is much easier to ignore a new failing test if tens of tests are already failing than to ignore the first failing test in a suite. In any case, you are now helping to strengthen the engineering culture of your team leading by example.

And what if no one notices? Oh well, you made at least the life better for yourself – and this is already a win!