I’m excited to announce Code Review Champion (my book on code reviews) is open for beta-readers!! I’ve been working on this short book to help engineers embrace technical feedback so they don’t have to dread code reviews. …

I’m a big advocate for code reviews. I’ve written about my experiences reviewing code, including lists of dos and don’ts, how to survive your first code review, and why we should review code at all. My views have been mainly shaped by my experience with a particular kind of code…

Design patterns are great to use. However, they can lead to roadblocks when used in excess — Learning patterns has become a core aspect for many people on their journey to becoming software engineers. Countless articles have been written about patterns and how to apply them. Courses, YouTube videos, and GitHub repos all exist to help engineers master the power of patterns. …

It’s a Friday in the office. The end of another Sprint iteration. And everything is a bit chaotic. Multiple devs still have outstanding work awaiting approvals so they can merge them into main. Many of them have merge conflicts. We've also got a high-priority bug fix that we still need…

Do you know if your code is working in production? If you can’t answer that question with a confident “Yes, it is” or “No, it’s not,” your software system isn’t complete. In today’s complex software landscape, we need to know whether our code is working correctly. And we need to…

Have you heard the myth of the 10x engineer? The 10x engineer myth claims that engineers are “10x more effective than others.” These unicorn-status engineers are often typecast “brilliant jerks” who ignore meetings to rewrite entire systems in a few days or leave their teams out to dry. The myth…

Working as a software engineer in today’s world often requires working with others. The top tech companies, fintechs, and even up-and-coming disruptors organize their engineers into teams with specific missions, goals, and ownership. It might be the fabled two-pizza team, or it might be a team of ten or more. …

A foundational component of Agile (whatever flavor of it you like) is daily improvement. Teams need to improve their code, tools, and even process to improve over time. But when exactly does a team talk about how they should be improving? Enter the retrospective. Retrospectives are some of the most…

Several years ago, I was tired after a particularly long week. We’d been under a deadline and trying to wrap up final tests for a feature. It had been a bumpy week, to say the least. One of our tests revealed a bug we needed to fix. Being the (newly…