[kodah]

Reading this article I realize how different I am from, I guess, some of my peers. I do like working on new things, but methodically shaping old software, bringing it up to date, and all the tactical thinking you need to employ to do so is very fun. Microservices are okay, and I use them mainly when I have a particular part of a codebase that's best suited to scale on its own. Outside of that, I'm a big fan of starting with monoliths that are written so they can be decomposed at a later date. There's something really nice about a well put together codebase.

Stack overflow is probably another place I differ from other engineers. I'll use it to discover patterns I'm not aware of, but I'm much more inclined to actually Ctrl+click and look at how a thing is implemented and it's sibling methods. Of course, you need well put together local configuration to do all that. I'm always looking for ways to keep my debugger in-tact, even when dealing with things like secret storage on a zero trust network. I use flags a lot for this that let me use mock-local responses.

Then again, I work on infrastructure stuff. The kind of applications I work on have to exist for a long time because of internal contracts and dependencies. Maybe this piece is more aimed at product SWEs.

[klysm]

I hit a turning point at some point where I stopped being afraid to read library code and ctrl click through things. Not sure when exactly it happened but I think it was related to some imposter syndrome and holding the library code as “holy”.

Looking through library code instead googling can be incredibly productive and polishes your code reading skills which are very important.

[VirusNewbie]

Yeah i’m a swe SRE and i love going into a moderately well architected application and making it even better or more scalable. It’s fun!