"A work environment that iterates quickly provides a faster feedback cycle and enables you to learn at a faster rate. Lengthy release cycles, formalized product approvals, and indecisive leadership slow down iteration speed; automation tools, lightweight approval processes, and a willingness to experiment accelerate progress." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"Adopting a mindset of instrumentation means ensuring we have a set of dashboards that surface key health metrics and that enable us to drill down to the relevant data. However, many of the questions we want to answer tend to be exploratory, since we often don’t know everything that we want to measure ahead of time. Therefore, we need to build flexible tools and abstractions that make it easy to track additional metrics." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"At fast-growing teams and companies, the number of problems to solve exceeds available resources, providing ample opportunities to make a big impact and to increase your responsibilities. The growth also makes it easier to attract strong talent and build a strong team, which feeds back to generate even more growth. A lack of growth, on the other hand, leads to stagnation and politics. Employees might squabble over limited opportunities, and it becomes harder to find and retain talent." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"Because we spend so much of our time at work, one of the most powerful leverage points for increasing our learning rate is our choice of work environment." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"But like many other aspects of code quality, building an
abstraction for a problem comes with tradeoffs. Building a generalized solution
takes more time than building one specific to a given problem. To break even,
the time saved by the abstraction for future engineers needs to outweigh the
time invested."
"Continuous deployment is but one of many powerful tools at
your disposal for increasing iteration speed. Other options include investing
in time-saving tools, improving your debugging loops, mastering your programming
workflows, and, more generally, removing any bottlenecks that you identify."
"Developing the skills to automate takes time, whether they be using shell scripts, browser extensions, or something else. But the cost of mastering these skills gets smaller the more often you do it and the better you get at it." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"Fine-tuning the efficiency of simple actions and saving a second here or there may not seem worth it at first glance. It requires an upfront investment, and you’ll very likely be slower the first few times you try out a new and unfamiliar workflow. But consider that you’ll repeat those actions at least tens of thousands of times during your career: minor improvements easily compound over time." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"Good metrics accomplish a number of goals. First, they help you focus on the right things. […] Second, when visualized over time, good metrics help guard against future regressions. […] Third, good metrics can drive forward progress. […] Fourth, a good metric lets you measure your effectiveness over time and compare the leverage of what you’re doing against other activities you could be doing instead." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"How can we reduce integration risk? One effective strategy
is to build end-to-end scaffolding and do system testing earlier. Stub out
incomplete functions and modules, and assemble an end-to-end system as soon as possible,
even if it’s only partly functional. Front-loading the integration work provides
a number of benefits. First, it forces you to think more about the necessary
glue between different pieces and how they interact, which can help refine the
integration estimates and reduce project risk. Second, if something breaks the
end-to-end system during development, you can identify and fix it along the
way, while dealing with much less code complexity, rather than scrambling to
tackle it at the end. Third, it amortizes the cost of integration throughout
the development process, which helps build a stronger awareness of how much
integration work is actually left."
"In any engineering discipline (and in life), there will always be more tasks to do than you have time for. Working on one task means not working on another. Therefore, regular prioritization is a high-leverage activity, because it determines the leverage of the rest of your time." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"It’s wishful thinking to believe that all the code we write will be bug-free and work the first time. In actuality, much of our engineering time is spent either debugging issues or validating that what we’re building behaves as expected. The sooner we internalize this reality, the sooner we will start to consciously invest in our iteration speed in debugging and validation loops." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"Many of us are familiar with the concept of a minimal, reproducible test case. This refers to the simplest possible test case that exercises a bug or demonstrates a problem. A minimal, reproducible test case removes all unnecessary distractions so that more time and energy can be spent on the core issue, and it creates a tight feedback loop so that we can iterate quickly." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"Project estimation and project planning are extremely difficult to get right, and many engineers (myself included) have learned this the hard way. The only way to get better is by practicing these concepts, especially on smaller projects where the cost of poor estimations is lower. The larger the project, the higher the risks, and the more leverage that good project planning and estimation skills will have on your success." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"Project estimation is one of the hardest skills that an
effective engineer needs to learn. But it’s crucial to master: businesses need
accurate estimates to make long-term plans for their products. They need to
know when resources might free up to work on upcoming features or when they can
promise feature requests to customers. And even when we don’t have pressure to
ship against a deadline, how long we think a project will take affects our
decisions of what to work on."
"Projects fail from under-communicating, not over-communicating.
Even if resource constraints preclude the dependency that you want from being
delivered any sooner, clarifying priorities and expectations enables you to
plan ahead and work through alternatives."
"Sometimes, we build things in a way that makes sense in the short-term but that can be costly in the long-term. We work around design guidelines because it’s faster and easier than following them. We punt on writing test cases for a new feature because there’s too much work to finish before the deadline. We copy, paste, and tweak small chunks of existing code instead of refactoring it to support our use cases. Each of these tradeoffs, whether they’re made from laziness or out of a conscious decision to ship sooner, can increase the amount of technical debt in our codebase." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"To be effective engineers, we need to be able to identify which activities produce more impact with smaller time investments. Not all work is created equal. Not all efforts, however well-intentioned, translate into impact." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"The best strategy for optimizing your iteration speed is the same as for optimizing the performance of any system: identify the biggest bottlenecks, and figure out how to eliminate them. What makes this difficult is that while tools, debugging workflows, and programming environments might be the areas most directly under your control as an engineer, sometimes they’re not the only bottlenecks slowing you down." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"The faster that you can iterate, the more that you can learn about what works and what doesn’t work. You can build more things and try out more ideas. Not every change will produce positive value and growth, of course." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"[…] the first heuristic for prioritizing high-leverage activities is to focus on what directly produces value. At the end of the day (or when it comes time for performance reviews), what matters is how much value you’ve created. […] the first heuristic for prioritizing high-leverage activities is to focus on what directly produces value. At the end of the day (or when it comes time for performance reviews), what matters is how much value you’ve created." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"The freedom to choose what to work on and how to do it drives our ability to learn—as long as we have the support that we need to use that freedom effectively. At established companies, employees tend to work on specialized projects, but they also have access to more coaching and structure. At smaller companies, you’ll end up wielding significantly more autonomy over the total surface area of product features and responsibilities, but you’ll also need to take more ownership of your own learning and growth." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"The next time you find yourself repeatedly going through the same motions when you’re fixing a bug or iterating on a feature, pause. Take a moment to think through whether you might be able to tighten that testing loop. It could save you time in the long run." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"To invest in your own growth, you should carve out your own 20% time. It’s more effective to take it in one- or two-hour chunks each day rather than in one full day each week, because you can then make a daily habit out of improving your skills. Your productivity may decrease at first (or it might not change much if you’re taking time away from web surfing or other distractions), but the goal is to make investments that will make you more effective in the long run." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"Ultimately, software quality boils down to a matter of
tradeoffs, and there’s no one universal rule for how to do things. […] Rigidly
adhering to a notion of building something 'the right way' can paralyze
discussions about tradeoffs and other viable options. Pragmatism - thinking in
terms of what does and doesn’t work for achieving our goals - is a more effective
lens through which to reason about quality."
"When establishing our goals, it’s important to choose carefully what core metrics to measure (or not measure) and optimize. When it comes to day-to-day operations, however, you should be less discriminatory: measure and instrument as much as possible. Although these two principles may seem contradictory, they actually complement each other. The first describes a high-level, big-picture activity, whereas the second is about gaining insight into what’s going on with systems that we’ve built." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"When you write to teach other people, you gain a deeper understanding of ideas you’re already familiar with and pinpoint the details that you didn’t fully understand." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
"Why is continuous deployment such a powerful tool? Fundamentally, it allows engineers to make and deploy small, incremental changes rather than the larger, batched changes typical at other companies. That shift in approach eliminates a significant amount of overhead associated with traditional release processes, making it easier to reason about changes and enabling engineers to iterate much more quickly." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
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