I was recently asked how I, as a staff engineer, work with and upskill other developers on my team. It was a great question, and I thought I'd write down a longer form version of the answer I gave. A core part of staff engineer's role is to grow the team. A staff engineer who doesn't up-level other engineers is a bottleneck. Staffs look to accelerate their team and their growth, so training and upskilling is incredibly important. It is also not really talked about, with most staffs picking up the skills haphazardly. Is there a better way to do it? Well, if you want to help someone improve, the first step is to figure out their lev...
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Software development is hard, and there have been many attempts to simplify the process over the years, some good, most bad. I'd like to discuss one of the bad attempts, a recurring problem I've seen in software development that myself and my friends have dubbed "Template Driven Development" (the bad TDD). Template Driven Development is the practice of reducing software development down to a series of templates that developers should follow. Developers are given a user story and a rigid schema for how their system should be structured, they are to use a set of pre-defined patterns that they must follow when modelling concepts in th...
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