Become a Better Software Engineer
To wrap up the series on protecting your time (see Part 1: coding and Part 2: focus), I want to briefly talk about writing. Putting information in written form and making it widely available is a great time saver. It removes the burden of having to communicate things 1:1 over and over. Write more As you design systems and write …
This is the second part of the series on making the most out of your time. The first part (Coding) focused on how to write your code to protect your future time. Today we focus on the present, meaning how to efficiently use the time you have now. You are a software engineer, right? This means you should spend most …
Asking technical questions is a key element of writing software. And today this is very often done by writing in some form of public forum. It can be an internal email group at your company, a public community such as stack overflow or GitHub, or even a private email to a colleague. Whatever the medium is, how you write the question …
This is the first of a three part series on protecting your time as an engineer (see Part 2: Focus). Even though our primary job is to create software, we often spend an inordinate amount of time on other activities. Whether its meetings, interruptions, chasing bugs in old code or just plain procrastinating, there’s a lot of time we could …
Last year (2016) I attended the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC) for the first time. In case you are not familiar with it, it’s a conference primarily for women in Computer Science. It’s a great event and quite an interesting experience to attend as a man. Back then I was still at Microsoft Research. I’ve always been involved in diversity efforts and …
