Lessons I learned from my ex-coworkers about software engineering

18 Dec 2022 #career

This post is part of my Advent of Code 2022.

For better or worse, we all have something to learn from our bosses and co-workers.

These are three lessons I learned from three of my ex-coworkers and ex-bosses about software engineering, designing, and programming.

I didn’t take the time to thank them when I worked with them. This is my thank you note.

1. Inspire Change

From Edgardo, the most senior of all developers, I learned to inspire change. He didn’t talk too much. But when he did, everybody listened.

He always brought new ideas to improve our development process. Instead of doing things himself, he dropped a seed on us. “Hey, what if we do something? Think of a way of achieving something else.”

He was the kind of guy who inspired trust to ask him anything, not only about coding. I tapped his shoulder: “hey, Edgardo. I have a question about life” and he dropped whatever he was doing to listen, answer, and inspire us all.

In emergencies, while everybody panicked, Edgardo was calm, going through log files and running diagnostics.

2. Stand on the shoulders of giants

From Javier, the architect, I learned to stand on the shoulder of giants.

When we ran into issues, he always said “you’re not the first one solving that problem” and “smarter people have already solved that.” He made us look out there first.

Every time I’m tempted to start something from scratch, I start looking at GitHub. Maybe I can stand on somebody else’s shoulders.

Recently, a coworker told me that reading an authorization token from a custom header with ASP.NET Core was impossible. And my first thought was: “we’re not the first ones doing that.” After some Googling, we definitively can do that. Javier was right!

Also, from Javier, I learned to read other people’s source code. He believed that’s the way of learning from others. By looking at his code.

3. Identify your users and their goals

From Pedro, the boss, I learned to keep in mind who our end users are.

More than once, I remember Pedro asking designers to change fonts and increase their size. He said: “you aren’t the one who’s going to use this app. This is for your dad and granddad. This is for oldies.”

Also, from Pedro, I learned to optimize for the most frequent scenario. Once we had to read and validate XML files, Pedro suggested storing the XML documents first and then validating them and continuing with the rest of the processing. Because “90% of the time, those documents are valid.”

Voilà! These are some of the lessons I learned from some of my post coworkers. What have you learned from your coworkers and bosses? I bet they have something to teach you.

For more career lessons, check things I wished I knew before becoming a software engineer, ten lessons learned after one year of remote work, and things I learned after a failed project.

Happy coding!