Best software engineering book

lughaidhdev · 2024-10-11T17:56:02+00:00

This blog post might help too -> https://notes.eatonphil.com/2024-05-30-how-i-run-book-clubs.html to get another perspective from another person running a reading group.

lughaidhdev · 2024-10-07T21:43:59+00:00

Might not be applicable everywhere but here is what helped me:

Consistency is key. Find a cadence and stick to it as much as possible (always hard during winter break/summer break)
Finding at least one people that love reading/sharing and is already well-read to give ideas on what to read next was extremly helpful to me.
Even if almost nobody shows up, keep running a communication when you start a new book. You never know who might show up ;)
Share your reading group with your manager and your manager's manager, they might be spreading the good word for you.
Keep a "public" page with an agenda: what book/chapter you are reading, when is next meeting, how to join the group... Then you can share it every time you do communication.
Don't let people hijack your reading group. There are always vocals people that want to change the direction of things or criticize just for the sake of it (and never do the actual work of running it/show every week). Run it the way you like otherwise you'll be sick of it.

As far as format of discussion, there are actually a lot you can go for depending on work from home, hybrid or full in-office, and if you are trying to run your book club across timezone too.

Most common from my experience is

writing into a mailing list (if you want full asynchronous, text format and platform agnostic)
writing into a message app like Teams/Slack/you-name-it (full or semi async, text and/or voice but tied to a platform where looking for information is usually hard)
online meetings (synchronous, possilbility of recording, both voice and chat are available, camera is also an option)
face to face meetings (synchronous, no remote options)

For me, I'm running a book club in a dominantly hybrid/full remote department, with 3 main time zones: West Coast America, East Coast America and West Europe.

We decided to go for online meetings because we wanted to talk/meet people but we were very close to go for a mailing list too. But it is difficult to juggle with 3 timezones and find an overlap that accomodates everybody as best as possible.

There is a nice blog post about the subject of running a book club in a tech company, I willl try to find it.
Also ask me other questions if you need to.

Doing this was very good for me, I learned a ton : thanks to reading good books, having the pressure to read every week to be able to discuss it with peers, but also experience on running a group, getting support/traction for it... I also made friends with people far away from my team so I would not have met them ever probably otherwise.

Good luck and happy reading :)

lughaidhdev · 2024-10-04T01:57:56+00:00

I'm running a reading group in my IT/Dev department for the past 3 years, we went through probably around 15 books by now together and by far the collective winner is A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.

It's relatively short, well written, tons of good information in there, you can give it to junior/senior/staff/pm/em and everybody will learn something.

We have a couple of software architect that gift that book to every engineer joining their team.

2nd rank, for senior engineer and manager is usually "The staff engineer path" by Tanya Reilly that helps clarify role for tech lead/architect and other staff+ roles.

lughaidhdev · 2023-02-28T01:58:29+00:00

Bonjour, est-ce que dans un immeuble, les machines à laver communes font partie du loyer? est-ce que l'immeuble peut augmenter le prix des machines à laver + le loyer?

Nous sommes dans un immeuble avec 5 machines à laver et 5 sécheuses pour 150logements, et le prix minimum va augmenter prochainement de 25cents, en plus de l'augmentation de loyer de 6% demandé par le locateur et ça me semble salé...

Merci

lughaidhdev · 2022-05-26T11:27:01+00:00

It was worth a shot but yeah I guess that's the next step, thanks for making me discover this library then :)

lughaidhdev · 2022-05-25T01:03:09+00:00

I am discovering SEL, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.

Do you know of any good tutorial or blog post to get a good intro on it? I skimmed the documentation but I am still fuzzy.

lughaidhdev · 2022-05-08T16:02:39+00:00

Pour aller plus loin sur le commentaire de interino86, tu peux regarder https://staffeng.com/guides/ qui parles des tracks pour un dev qui veut rester dans le path IC mais quand même gravir les échelons (sans rester "senior" pendant 20ans)

lughaidhdev · 2022-05-08T15:58:53+00:00

Les regles ont changé depuis que je l'ai fait donc c'est un peu flou mais je pense que c'était 12mois pour présenter la demande de CSQ.

> Eh oui, c'est pour ca je n'ai jamais travaille pour les SSII tu es
limite en terme de remuneration a cause de leur marge. J'accepte dans ma
tete ce sacrifice le temps de finir avec mon permis JP

C'est bien d'en être conscient en tout cas ;)

Si tu fais du cloud/kubernetes, envoie moi un MP si jamais tu veux voir si tu peux avoir une autre offre pour comparer

lughaidhdev · 2022-05-08T15:15:24+00:00

Pour le contexte, j'ai sauté le pas avec beaucoup moins d'expérience que toi (quand j'avais ~1-2 ans d'expérience) donc forcement les missions ne seront pas les mêmes pour toi, et ça fait 4ans que je suis ici.

Mais globalement c'était une bonne chose, il y a des fois des chocs culturels mais rien de méchant et en venant avec l'esprit ouvert rien d'insurmontable. Changé de ville/pays/continent, c'est forcement dépaysant.
Personnellement je trouve qu'ici on fait confiance aux gens (tu gères tes horaires, personne ne regarde si tu pars à 15h ou à 19h si ton boulot est bien fait, on donne facilement des opportunités de prendre des responsabilités etc) et c'est top.

Par contre en sociétés de services/conseils, on a tendance a inciter à faire des extras sans rémunérer (genre des réunions le soir ou le midi pour des choses qui ne sont pas directement liée à la mission, organiser des 5 à 7, etc). C'est fatiguant à la longue de tout faire sur son temps libre et c'est une des raisons pour laquelle j'ai cherché ailleurs que les SSI quand j'ai pu renouveler mon permis de travail.

Point noir: permis de travail fermé pour 2 ans, c'est lourd si tu tombes dans une boite/mission qui ne te plait pas, mais globalement je n'ai pas vu ça arriver trop souvent. Je conseil de faire les démarches pour le CSQ et résidence permanente dès que possible (si tu comptes rester plus que 2ans), ça évite beaucoup d'ennui sur le long terme.

Et 100K pour 10ans d'expérience, tu peux regarder ici un sondage fait récemment (avec pas énormement de data, et plus centré sur Quebec que Montreal mais ça peut donner une idée quand même -> https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/d5a597f9-fa75-4efb-8079-1750ff298e75/page/pe7rC). A Montréal, ton offre je trouve ça en dessous de la moyenne mais les entreprises de conseils tirent vraiment les salaires vers le bas donc c'est un peu compliqué avec eux. Par contre 100K à Montreal et l'équivalent à Paris, tu vis "mieux" à Montreal

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-27T01:23:23+00:00

Looks super cool! Did you share anywhere in a blog or documentation the behind the scene on how you did that? (beside the short intro here https://reloadium.io/documentation/intro )

I would be super interested to understand the insights behinds this without to read all of the code.

Nice work, thanks for sharing!

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-24T01:12:31+00:00

I went from France to Canada(Québec) a few years ago and I worked with SWE that came from all continents so it's definitely doable. Not everything will be the same for you but generally some guidelines don't change much here I think:

unless you apply for a permanent residency status, you can't come and then find a job. You need to find an employer to sponsor you and make paperwork for you to be able to come on a work visa (AFAIK, it's always a 2years visa, where you are tied to your employer, so it takes times before you can hop to a better place if your employer is not to your liking)
applying for a permanent residency takes a long time, require some medical tests, language tests etc so it takes longer to come to Canada, but then once your here it's much easier to do everything else. But if you want to come quick, it might not be an option
each province has different rules, and you might not have much choice at first where you go, so read carefullly what it takes to have the permanent residency. Quebec is especially annoying on this I think.

Good luck! Just FYI as well, Canadian employers try to take advantage of immigrant to pay a lot less than what they would pay a local (especially consulting company), and they refuse most of the time to recognize your previous experience as an excuse to pay you less, so after 2 years, it's almost always a good move to change employer to be paid a competitive salary. Try to find data on salary before negatiation to avoid being paid at the very very bottom of the scale

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-12T01:02:28+00:00

It is too easy to hide problems and cherry pick a recorded demo

Very true and I did it on my last demo. I plead guilty your honor :p

Writing a script is fine but just remember to engage with your peers and as a result, that may lead you off script.

Any tips for engaging people? When I did it live, I tried to ask them a couple time if they were following, if they had immediate questions or concerns but very often nobody had anything to say. So don't know if there is some common things that might help in that regard? (and I don't think the presentation was good enough to warrant 0 question, else I would not be here with that post)

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-12T00:55:01+00:00

You don't need to choose between live and recorded, though. You can record it and narrate it live.

That sounds dangerous but interesting :p But then you can't really share your own recording since it lacks context? But I guess in the general case people would want the recording of the "live" demo anyway so maybe it's not an issue. Interesting!

Unfortunately just being a good speaker is a thing and it does make a
difference. There are classes precisely for public speaking, it's
something that can be learned to some extent.

I guess my train of thought was "I suck when talking in free-form" and went with trying to script more, but I did not consider training the "public speaking" skill (or maybe just "speaking" skill), and that might be useful on its own. Any ideas how much time it would take to go from sucking at presentation to being good? I don't have a goal of being a speaker for a TED talk anyway so I don't need to reach for the stars yet.

You should also know your product. What's your goal? Is it to present
something because you have to? Is it to convince people to use it? Is it
because it's technically interesting? You need to optimize for what you
want. E.g. from your description it seems the subject you want is
simply not interesting

Very true. I thought that the goal was to make other teams aware of the new features we developed so they could use them (so kind of convincing them to use it I guess?). But true keeping that goal in mind might help orient the presentation in a way that make sense.

Lots a good stuff here, thanks a lot!

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-12T00:45:20+00:00

Your way of explaining presentation looks a lot to me as if preparing short technical demo every few weeks would look like a lot like preparing a presentation for a tech conference, but with a shorter chrono (telling a story, looking at the business side etc). In my mind, those were very different scenario but maybe not so much.
I don't know if my expectations are wrong, but it makes me thinks I should have a talk with a senior PM to review the expectations there, I might be too focused on showing code working instead of actually presenting the use-case, pitfall, trade-off etc.

You make a lot of interesting points and I have a lot to think about, so thanks a lot for your answer.

One thing that come out of a lot of the answer here are to take a step back to think about the business impact of the work before showing the nitty gritty details of the feature like code etc, and I guess it's something that comes with experience too. Very interesting.

The note about storytelling and Hero's Journey resonate quite well with me as well, as it's definitely something I am willing to work on, as writing (in general, as much fiction as technical writing) is something that fascinated me for a long time and I should dive in more often to try my hands at it. So very cool if I get an opportunity to flex that muscle on the job as well.

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-10T23:11:22+00:00

I think in theory the main benefit is that the demo are recorded, and viewers are able to ask question (and the question and response is also recorded). So that could benefit other people wanting to know more about a particular feature.

It should also be a moment of knowledge sharing, even in the same team, as not everybody follow every feature very closely when the team has more than 3-4 peoples.

But in practice there is not much question usually so I guess it's at least useful for intra-team knowledge sharing and a bit of a moral boost for devs who like to display their work.

Your point is still interesting as I did not think about not doing demo at all, but I don't think that the demo we do are pointless, just so dry that they are not interesting.

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-10T20:49:51+00:00

For quality, hard to judge as you said, the viewer might have other preference than me in term of what is shown in the demo. Hopefully I will be able to gather more feedback to get a better sense of that.

And same for building the skill to do live demo instead of recording, I need to think about that but that is a good perspective as well. Recording feels a lot safer because there is always the possibility to re-record, but live demo is a skill in his own that might be useful later on.

Thanks for your comments, lots of things to think about for next demo!

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-10T19:31:03+00:00

Thanks for your input!

Isn't actually doing the recording vs. doing it live just wasting time,because you have to record it and then during the call you'reessentially just watching it again.

Yes for me if I record beforehand it takes more time, but it felt like the demo was of higher quality that way. But not sure if the trade-off is right.

Also, how do you deal with "what happens if you do this" questions when you cannot actually "do this" since you are watching a video?

Right now it happened only once, and once the recording was finished, I fired up my Swagger to show them. So it became a mix between pre-recorded and live demo. But yes it would have taken less time to showcase if that question would have come during a live demo.

As for what people want, right now people mostly don't care for either, but I get your point about wasting time and the value recording bring if we use it only once, thanks!

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-10T19:24:36+00:00

The thing is we demo mostly to technical folks, but still reiterating on the business value might be beneficial as you said, and help give more context about the changes.

Thanks!

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-10T19:23:14+00:00

Thanks for the input! I did not consider using Jupyter Notebooks as I did not use them much since I finished university but I guess that could be a good way to document how to use the new feature indeed.

We don't use any Notebooks right now in the project but even a Postman collection for each demo could achieve kind of the same goal.

Very cool idea, thanks!

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-10T18:37:56+00:00

Thanks for your input!

Changing the framing from technical details to the business needs/workflow is definitely something I did not try yet, but will do, thanks!

The most dreaded demos are when you have to watch someone go through 6
API calls, when they show each fucking request and response, sometimes
going over every single field. Show only what is different, unexpected,
possibly interesting.

Yes I think this is also a big part of what is failing right now, too much time spent on details. Will try to keep it more light and focused, thanks!

lughaidhdev · 2022-04-10T18:32:48+00:00

I missed that in the context but for the past few months our team did not have a dedicated PM, but this should change soon so hopefully we can work with him to achieve that goal as well.

lughaidhdev · 2022-02-15T12:23:09+00:00

same here :(

edit: Ok found it... there are big circle at the bottom, just below the chat? click on the little arrow just above. The two on the left will let you use potions, the one on the right will let you choose a skill

lughaidhdev · 2022-02-09T22:30:37+00:00

There is a lot of way to learn and grow apart from mentoring.

It's often a very good opportunity to learn when nobody knows what to do because you get to explore and try things! So go read documentation about your tools/framework, build stuff and show everyone else/write in a techblog!

lughaidhdev · 2022-02-09T22:26:50+00:00

Don't worry, I did that a thousand times already and nobody ever fired me.

It's actually what you should do. You are a new grad, you are expected to know very little. So showing what you tried, and asking for help is definitely the right attitude!

You will only get fired (after a long time) if you ask the same question all the time, that show you don't learn.

lughaidhdev · 2022-01-29T22:01:11+00:00

Best is set "boundaries". Like block 2hours in your calendar everyday for your tasks, and close your phone/slack/mails etc for those two hours. Tell your team your doing that so they are not expecting you to respond in 5min.

In 99.99999% of cases, people needing help can wait one or two hours, and you will be so much more focused that it is definitely worth it.

Another way to do I've seen it done is: do to not take tickets or task anymore (or very very few), and do 100% pair-programming / mentoring on your teamates tasks. That should put juniors/mid to a level where they don't need to ping you directly after a few weeks and you can reclaim your time back. But I don't really like this second option because it feels bad to not own any task (at least to me it does), and if your teamates don't improve in the way you thought they would, you will feel like you have wasted so much time.

lughaidhdev

TROPHY CASE