markdown Effective_Engineer.md

Posted 2021-05-06

*FWIW: I didn't produce the content present here. I've just copy-pasted it from somewhere over the Internet, but I cannot remember exactly the original source. I was also not able to find the author's name, so I cannot give him/her the proper credit.*

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# Effective Engineer - Notes
- By Edmond Lau
- Highly Recommended :+1:
- http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/

### What's an Effective Engineer? 
- They are the people who get things done. Effective Engineers produce results. 

## Adopt the Right Mindsets

### Focus on High Leverage Activities
- Leverage = Impact Produced / Time Invested
- Use Leverage as Your Yardstick for Effectiveness
- 80% of the impact comes from 20% of the work.
- Focus on high leverage and not just easy wins.

### Optimize for Learning 
- Change jobs if you have to. 
- Optimizing for learning is high leverage. 
- Adopt a growth mindset. 
  - Talk to people. Become good at telling stories. It gets better with time. 
  - Those with a growth mindset believe that they can cultivate and grow their intelligence and skills through effort.
  - Own your story.
- Invest in the rate of learning
  - Learning compounds. Compounding leads to exponential growth. Earlier the compounding starts, the better. 
  - Working on unchallenging tasks is a huge opportunity cost. You missed out on compounded learning. 
  - Prioritize learning over profitability.
  - Invest your time in activities with the highest learning rate.
- Seek Work Environments Conducive to Learning
  - Fast Growth: Companies where #problems >> #resources. Opportunity to choose high impact work.
  - Make sure you are working on high priority projects. 
  - Openness: Look for culture with curiosity, where everyone is encouraged to ask questions.
  - Fast Paced. 
  - People smarter than you.
  - Autonomy: Freedom to choose what to work on. Smaller companies => More autonomy. 
- While on Job
  - Make a daily habit of acquiring new skills.
  - Read code written by brilliant engineers. 
  - Jump fearlessly into code you don't know.
  - Always be learning. Invest in skills that are in high demand.
  - Read Books. Attend Conferences.
  - Build and maintain strong relationships.

### Prioritize Regularly
- Opportunity cost of working on wrong ideas can set back growth by years.
- Prioritize tasks based on ROI.
- Regular prioritization is high leverage activity.
- On TODO Lists:
  - Maintain a 'single' todo lists where all tasks are listed. 
  - Don't try to remember stuff. Brain is bad at remembering. It's rather good at processing. 
- Ask yourself regularly: Is this the most important thing I should be working on?
- Focus on what directly produces value. 
- Learn to say no.
- Focus on the important and non-urgent.
- Find ways to get into flow. “A state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems.”
- When possible, preserve larger blocks of focused time in your schedule.
- Limit the amount of Work in Progress.
  - Cost of context switching is high.
- Prioritizing is difficult. 
- Prioritization is high leverage. It has huge impact on your ability to get right things done.

### Invest in Iteration Speed 
- Continuous Deployment is high leverage.
  - Will save a lot of time in manual deployment of code. They are the people who get things done. Effective Engineers produce results. 
- Move fast to learn fast.
  - Move fast and break things.
  - Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn at faster rate. 
- Invest in time saving tools.
  - If you have to do something more than twice, write a tool the third time. 
  - Tools are multipliers that allow your to scale your impact beyond the confines of a day.
  - Faster tools get used more often.
  - Faster tools can enable new workflows that previously weren't possible.
  - Productivity skyrockets with tools.
  - Time saving property of tools also scale with team adoption.
- Shorten your debugging and validation Loops.
  - Extra time spent in optimizing debugging workflow can help you fix annoying bugs with less headache.
  - Debugging is hard. It's time consuming. Upfront investments to shorten debugging loops are worth it. 
- High test coverage to reduce build and site breakages.
- Fast unit tests to encourage people to run them.
- Fast and incremental compiles and reloads to reduce development time.
- Master you programming environment.
  - One editor. One high level language. Shell. Keyboard > Mouse. Automate manual workflows. Use interactive shell. Make running specific tests easy.
- **Faster you can iterate, faster you can learn.** 

### Measure what you want to Improve
- Use metric to drive progress.
  - If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.
  - Good metric. 
    - Helps you focus on right things.
    - Drives forward progress.
    - Helps you guard against future regressions. 
    - **Performance ratcheting**: Any change should strictly improve the metric.  
    - Bad metric can lead to unwanted behavior.
    - Examples: 
      - #hours worked < productivity.
      - click through rates < long click through rates.
  - Metric you choose influences your decisions and behavior.
  - Look for metric that, when optimized, maximizes impact for the team.
  - Actionable metric - Whose movement can be casually explained by team's effort.
  - Responsive metric - Updates quickly to give back feedback whether a given change was =ve or -ive.
  - Choosing a metric is high leverage.
  - Dedicate time to pick right metric. 
- Instrument everything to understand what's going on. 
  - Measure anything, measure everything. 
  - Graphite, statsd. A single line of code lets you define a new counter or timer on the fly. 
  - Measuring goals you want to achieve is high leverage.
- Internalize useful numbers.
  - Knowledge of useful numbers provide a valuable shortcut for knowing where to invest efforts to maximize gains.
  - Need upfront work. Need not be accurate, ballpark idea suffices.
  - Knowing useful numbers enables you to do back of the envelope calculations to quickly estimate the performance properties of a design without actually building it.
  - Internalizing useful number help you spot anomalies.
Be skeptical about data integrity.
 - Log data liberally.
 - Build tools to iterate on data accuracy sooner.
 - Examine data sooner.
 - When numbers look off, dig in to it sooner.
 
:heavy_check_mark: Measure your progress. Carefully choose your top-level metric. Instrument your system. Know your numbers. Prioritize data integrity. 

### Validate your ideas early and often. 
- Not validating early leads to wasted efforts.
- Don't delay get feedback. 
- Find low effort ways to validate work. 
- Power of small batches. Helps you avoid making a big mistake by stopping the flow.
- Approach problem iteratively. 
- No large implementations.
- Working solo? Be wary. Be extra vocal and get feedback.

### Improve project estimation skills.
- Beware of mythical man month. Communication overhead is significant. 
- Reduce risk early.
- Rewrite projects - almost always fail. 
- Additional hours hurt productivity. Causes burnout. 
- Do the riskiest task first. 
- Allow buffer room for the unknown.

### Balance Quality with Pragmatism
- High code quality. Code readability.
- Establish sustainable code review process.
- Code reviews help:
  - Catch bugs and design problems early.
  - Sharing working knowledge of the codebase.
  - Increases long term agility. Easier to understand, quicker to modify. 

#### Manage complexity through Abstraction  
- Example: MapReduce.
- Right abstractions make huge difference.
- “Pick the right ones, and programming will flow naturally from design; modules will have small and simple interfaces; and new functionality will more likely fit in without extensive reorganization,”
- “Pick the wrong ones, and programming will be a series of nasty surprises: interfaces will become baroque and clumsy as they are forced to accommodate unanticipated interactions, and even the simplest of changes will be hard to make.”
- The right abstraction can increase engineering productivity by an order of magnitude. 
- Simple abstractions avoid interweaving multiple concepts, so that you can reason about them independently rather than being forced to consider them together.
- Designing good abstractions take work. 
- An abstraction's usage and popularity provides a reasonable proxy for its quality.

#### Automate Testing
- Unit test cases and some integration testing provide a scalable way of managing growing codebase.
- A suite of extensive and automated tests can reduce overall error rates by validating the quality and by safeguarding against regressions.
- Tests also allow engineers to make changes, especially large refactorings, with significantly higher confidence.
- Despite its benefits, it can be difficult to foster a culture of automated testing.
- Focus on high leverage tests. 
- Writing more tests, creating a virtuous feedback cycle and saving more development time.

#### Repay Technical Debt
- Technical debt refers to all the deferred work that’s necessary to improve the health and quality of the codebase and that would slow us down if left unaddressed.
- Accumulating technical debt is fine as far as it is repaid within time. 
- Refactor often.

### Reduce Operational Complexity
- Keep no. of technologies low. Don’t sway towards shiny new technologies.
- Every additional technology you add is is guaranteed to go wrong eventually. Will need your time. 
- Do the simple thing first.
- Embrace operational simplicity. 
- The first solution that comes to mind is generally complex. Don't stop. Keep peeling off the layers of onion. 
- Simplify the architecture to reduce their operational burden. 
- “What’s the simplest solution that can get the job done while also reducing our future operational burden?” 
- Discipline to focus on simplicity is high leverage. 

### Fail Fast 
- Fail immediately and visibly.
- Doesn’t necessarily mean crashing your programs for users.
- fail-fast to surface issues immediately. 
- Failing fast is high leverage as it saves debugging time.

### Relentlessly Automate
- Automating mechanics is good.
- Automating decision making - no.
- Hone your ability to respond and recover quickly.
  - Leverage recovering quickly > Leverage preventing failures.
- “script for success,” practice failure scenarios, and work on our ability to recover quickly. 
- Make batch process idempotent 
- Make processes retryable, i.e., not leaving any global state. 

### Invest in your team's Growth
- Invest in onboarding.
- The higher you climb up the engineering ladder, the more your effectiveness will be measured not by your individual contributions but by your impact on the people around you.
- **"You’re a staff engineer if you’re making a whole team better than it would be otherwise. You’re a principal engineer if you’re making the whole company better than it would be otherwise. And you’re distinguished if you’re improving the industry.”** 
- Focus primarily on making everyone around you succeed.
- Your career depends on your team's success.
- Make hiring everyone's responsibility. 
- Shared ownership of code. 
  - Keep bus factor more than one. 
  - Shared ownership removes isolated silos of information.
- Build collective wisdom through post mortems.
- Invest in automated testing.
  - Automated test cases lead to higher confidence when refactoring.
  - Write test cases when the code is fresh in mind.
  - Don’t be dogmatic about 100% code coverage.
  - Value of tests increases over time and cost to write goes down. 
- Hire the best. 
- Surround yourself with great advisors

:sunny: **“Leverage is the lens through which effective engineers view their activities. ”** :sunny:

### 10 Books to read: 
- Peopleware Productive projects and Teams. Amazon. My Summary.
- Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others. (Debugging Teams) Amazon. My Summary. 
- High Output Management
- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
- The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
- Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values
- Your Brain at Work
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
- Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals

### Blogs: 

Recommended Blogs To Follow:

* http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/ - The Effective Engineer is my personal blog, where I write about engineering habits, productivity tips, leadership, and culture.
* http://www.kalzumeus.com/ - Patrick McKenzie runs his own software business and has written many excellent long-form articles on career advice, consulting, SEO, and software sales.
* http://katemats.com/ - Kate Matsudaira, who has worked at large companies like Microsoft and Amazon as well as at startups, shares advice about tech, leadership, and life on her blog.
* http://randsinrepose.com/ - Michael Lopp has worked for many years in leadership positions at Netscape, Apple, Palantir, and Pinterest, and writes about tech life and engineering management.
* http://softwareleadweekly.com/ - Oren Ellenbogen curates a high-quality weekly newsletter on engineering leadership and culture.
* http://calnewport.com/ - Cal Newport, an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown, focuses on evidence-based advice for building a successful and fulfilling life.
* http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ - Joel Spolsky, the co-founder of Stack Exchange, provides all sorts of programming pearls of wisdom on his blog.
* http://martinfowler.com/ - Martin Fowler, author of the book Refactoring, writes about how to maximize the productivity of software teams and provides detailed write-ups of common programming patterns.
* http://pgbovine.net/ - Philip Guo, a computer science professor, has written extensively and openly about his graduate school and work experiences.