Software Mentor

Hey there,

My name is Phil (@pliao39) and I’m a software engineer.

I spent about 5 years working in software in SF and picked up a lot of lessons along the way. I’ve mentored my fair share of interns and junior engineers - and looking back, I wish I could’ve mentored myself as well.

My goal for this newsletter is twofold:

• Accelerate the career of junior engineers: I’ve seen people get placed on great teams early in their careers and watched their careers take off. I’ve seen others get stuck in a “lord of the flies” situation, where the blind lead the blind. Not pretty. I believe juniors should have access to good mentorship regardless of what team they’re on.

• Share the burden of mentorship for senior engineers: It’s exhausting being a mentor. To properly mentor a junior, you need to provide instruction, give constructive feedback, offer (some) emotional support, and possess a deep reservoir of patience (juniors are often smart, but overconfident and under-skilled).

There are a lot of topics I want to write about. Here’s a list of potential ones:

• What is it like to be let go in a layoff? How do you manage the emotions? How do you get another job?

• Should I be working on side projects while I work a day job?

  • What makes a good side project? Revenue? Users? Learning?

• What languages should I learn?

  • Rust sounds cool. Go sounds popular. Dart + Flutter are growing. How should I choose?

• How to tell if my manager is good or bad (for me)

  • Will my career grow or stagnate under my manager and how can I tell early?

• What does a good 1-1 look like?

• How important are peer relationships (people who are within 3-6 months of experience as you)?

• How can I position myself in my company to take advantage of growth opportunities

  • Not all projects are created equal. 1 year of experience on a good project != 1 year of experience on a bad one

• How do I navigate technical debt

  • Corollary: is the technical debt at your company basically a ponzi scheme or is it some strategically deployed AAA debt?

  • Beware of egos

  • Is it useful to learn how to clean up technical debt?

• Which books should I read?

• Should I be leetcoding even if I'm happy at my job?

• How can I effectively use code review to grow?

  • There's getting a "quick stamp" - and then there's quality control. But you need to first determine who knows quality - and that can be hard to judge as a junior engineer.

• Shit, I have to do something in X, but I don't understand it at all. Is there a quick guide? (Some examples of X)

  • Security

  • IAM, SAML, and SSO

  • Databases, Queues, and Caches

    • Replication lag bugs

  • Configuration Management

  • Testing

  • Client-Server, APIs, and IDLs (including GraphQL)

  • Metrics and Logging

  • ElasticSearch and Lucene

  • Time

  • Currency

  • Serialization and Networking

  • Service Discovery

  • Command Line basics

  • Cookies and Sessions (possibly AdTech)

  • Email Protocols (IMAP, POP3, SMTP)

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