Accelerate your software engineering career by unblocking yourself

Every software engineer gets stuck every once in a while. What makes the difference is, how we deal with it.

Being “stuck” means not being able to make progress on the top priority work.

The bigger the company the more likely it is to get stuck due to organizational, not technical reasons. Knowing how to navigate these situations has a direct impact on your career. If you can, you should prevent getting into this state in the first place, but it’s not always possible.

One of the most effective ways to get unblocked is to talk to people. Sometimes finding the right person is difficult, but it can be done. If you don’t know this person, maybe you know a person who knows this person? You can also post your question to a company forum, Slack channel or mailing list. For technical questions, the ultimate hack is to find relevant code and see who contributed to it.

When working with multiple teams communication is crucial. Frequent sync ups help discover issues before it’s too late. To mitigate the impact of delays, you need to establish an interface both teams can work against. This way both teams can make meaningful progress independently.

Getting unblocked can be difficult and even frustrating at times, but the alternative – waiting until things get better themselves is not a winning strategy.

Accelerate your software engineering career by reading code

Many developers often focus solely on writing code, neglecting the importance of being able to read code. How do I know? Because I was one of them!

The ability to read code is a crucial skill for every developer, as we often spend more time reading code than actually writing it. However, reading code is often more challenging than writing code. It requires piecing together the context from various parts and putting yourself in the shoes of the original code author. Fortunately, this skill can be learned. As a software engineer, you have plenty of opportunities to enhance this skill while performing your job:

Participating in code reviews
Debugging code that is outside of your area of ownership
Familiarizing yourself with the code of libraries that you depend on

And, there is also GitHub with thousands of repositories solving problems of all shapes and sizes. You are guaranteed to find something that will interest you and dive in.

Improving your ability to read code will unlock many benefits for you:

Getting up to speed when changing jobs or teams will be smoother and faster.
Code reviews will take less time.
Understanding bugs and fixing them correctly the first time will be easier.
Knowing how your dependencies work will help you come up with better designs.
Your debugging will be more effective, especially in cases where you can’t debug directly (e.g. missing debug symbols, decompiled code, etc.).

If you feel reading code is not your thing, think again. It might take some time to pick up this skill, but it will serve you for years.

Accelerate your software engineering career by writing good commit messages

“’Fixing a bug’ is a great commit message!” said no one.

Why? Because commit messages like this make our jobs frustrating.

Good commit messages on the other hand, make our jobs easier and save everyone time as they:

give more clarity to the diff author – if you, as the diff author, have a hard time writing a good commit message maybe your change is not ready for review?
help understand what the person who wrote the code was thinking which makes it much easier to grasp reasons why the code was written the way it was written and helps avoid introducing regressions
provide the context for code reviewers and as a result facilitate faster code reviews by lowering the barrier to entry for anyone willing to review the change
allow finding commits quicker

Note that this is not about making commit messages longer. Long commit messages are not necessarily good commit messages. Good commit messages are short but informative. In many cases a single line explaining what the change is about is sufficient. More complex changes, especially bug fixes, often require more context:

What exactly the change is about. This information is a must, and should be always included in the title.
Why you are making this change. What scenario it unblocks. What issue it fixes.
Short description of implementation details.
If fixing a bug, how to reproduce it.
How the change was tested – especially useful for any validation beyond unit tests
Links to related issues or tasks

You can find an expanded version of this post here: https://growingdev.substack.com/p/how-to-remove-unnecessary-friction

Accelerate your software engineering career by deleting code

While you were writing some new shiny features today, the following happened:

Someone accidentally disabled a feature flag gating the most important product feature that shipped years ago
Someone spent a day fixing tests not realizing the code being tested is only executed by these tests
Someone missed a deadline because the build system was building long forgotten libraries instead of the code they committed to ship

The common denominator for all these cases – dead code.

Aggressively cleaning code that is no longer needed or used can, and will make your team more effective because it reduces the overall complexity of the codebase. This, in turn, unlocks a lot of benefits:

bugs and mistakes are easier to avoid
new features can be delivered faster
less time is spent on (unneeded) maintenance

Deprecating rarely used features takes it to the next level.

Try it, and you may turn your team into a team of the proverbial “10x engineers”.

Tab Garbage Collector

I am very good at opening new Chrome tabs but not as great at closing them. Very often, I open a tab and forget about it and to open a new one. As a result, I always end up with a lot of duplicate tabs that only take my precious tab space. At the same time I feel anxious whenever I think about closing a tabs. To “solve” my problem I created a simple Chrome extension – Tab Garbage Collector – that finds duplicate tabs and let’s me close them with just one click. I know that this is not only my problem so I published my extension in the Chrome Web Store so that anyone can use it.

Here is a short video showing the extension in action

If you are interested what’s under the hood, the code is available on github.