Getting a new developer job — whether you’re experienced or new to the field — is all about traction. You need materials in your application that hook people. Someone has to notice you, out of a field of applicants. Standing out is hard, but there are ways to rise to…

Manually reproducing a bug is good! But it’s slow. Really slow. If you have to click through the UI to recreate the bug every time, you’re going to be working at sub-optimal speeds. Same for making API requests to replicate a bug. When there’s complex logic in play, I want…

I get it — we all want more readers. A strong (often controversial or outrageous) title can earn a ton of views. The nature of the algorithm rewards clickbait. But it’s starting to get out of hand. When the content doesn’t live up to the headline, we all suffer. The temptation I…

I’ve recently been working on a whole book about the path to become a senior developer. Working on the book has me thinking a lot about what sets senior developers apart. I recently received a reader email. It helped me pinpoint an important commonality among all senior engineers: You mentioned…

Four different principal engineers from different teams grilled us with tough questions… They were scrutinizing a software design that I had contributed heavily to. Today, I want to talk about software design. How do you design systems that can stand up to the interrogations of senior engineers? You’re being cagey! I’m writing about…

This week in my inbox, I received some great reader questions. I’ll attempt to answer them here, so that everyone can benefit from the responses! Improve your writing as a developer I was wondering regarding the writing point you made here and in quite a few older articles. I definitely see the value in it, but…

Fast feedback leads to rapid improvement. When you’re building a new feature or fixing a bug, the top predictor of rapid success is your feedback loop. How will you know when it’s working? Can we automate that process? The quicker you know something is broken, the sooner you can fix…