Software Engineering Tidbits

Software Engineering Tidbits

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Onboarding

Georges El Khoury's avatar
Georges El Khoury
Aug 02, 2022
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Starting a new job is exciting. New company, repos and team members.

Below are things that are good to do while on-boarding.

Meet everyone you can. This includes team members and managers. Ask them what they do, the issues they are seeing and what they plan to work on next.

This will give you an understanding of the business, the current issues and the product roadmap.

Understand your company org chart. This will let you understand how the company is structured and how it operates. Try to figure out the charter and responsibility of every team

Understand the architecture and the different services. Draw an end to end flow of your product and the different areas it touches.

Enlist in the repo. Get your IDE setup. Get couple of bugs fixed ideally across the stack. Do not skip this step. It is hard to get a feel and true understanding without getting close to the code.

Understand the monitoring dashboards. These usually end up capturing the heartbeat and priorities of the business.

Finally, ask a lot of questions. Be curious. Be humble. Show professionalism. Be on time. Add any missing info to the onboarding doc. Show and share progress of your onboarding. Enjoy and make new friends.

Good luck!


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A good unit test
A good unit test should be:
Feb 20, 2023 • 
Georges El Khoury
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A good unit test
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A good way to debug
One of the best software engineering tip I received is a good way to debug.
Apr 28, 2022 • 
Georges El Khoury
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A good way to debug
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Outage Management
Outage management is a core skill for a software engineer to acquire and is critical to achieve high availability of an online service.
Feb 13, 2023 • 
Georges El Khoury
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