Lessons Learned from Software Engineering Practices

My younger self would hate how I code now. Here's why that's a good thing. During a conversation couple of days ago, a friend asked me "If you had to build an in-memory cache, how would you do it?" I thought I knew the answer. After all, I'd been coding for years. But as I started designing it on paper, something unexpected happened. I realized how much my approach had changed over time. 8 years ago, I would've jumped straight into coding a complex system. Today? I took a step back and asked myself: 𝟭. 𝗖𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗿 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗰𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱? • Younger me would've scoffed. "Build it yourself!" he'd say. How hard could it be? • But experience taught me: use off-the-shelf when possible. 𝟮. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗺𝘂𝗺 𝘄𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱? • I used to love adding features.  • Now I know: Reliability trumps bells and whistles every time. 𝟯. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻? • In the past, I'd spend weeks perfecting before deploying.  • Now I aim for MVP and learn from real usage. 𝟰. 𝗖𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗮 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗮𝘆 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝗳𝗮𝗻𝗰𝘆 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲? • Complexity used to excite me.  • Now it scares me. Simple often outperforms complex in the real world. 𝟱. 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘄𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘂𝗽𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁? • I once thought dynamic allocation was always better.  • Experience showed me: failing fast saves night calls. 𝟲. 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘀? • "The sky's the limit!" was my motto.  • Now I know limits prevent surprises (and outages). 𝟳. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁? • Testing was an afterthought.  • Now it's built into the design from day one. 𝟴. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘄𝗲 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲? • I used to fly blind.  • Now I embed performance counters everywhere. These practices aren't just theory. They're battle-scars from countless projects, sleepless nights, and hard-learned lessons. And they've transformed how I approach every coding challenge. The result? Cleaner code. Fewer bugs. Happier teammates. Better sleep. That's the power of experience-driven engineering. It's not about knowing more. It's about knowing what matters. 𝙋.𝙎. 𝙒𝙝𝙞𝙘𝙝 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙨 𝙢𝙤𝙨𝙩 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙟𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙣𝙚𝙮? 𝘿𝙧𝙤𝙥 𝙖 𝙣𝙪𝙢𝙗𝙚𝙧 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨! #founderstory #lessons #developer #founder #startup #growthhacks

10 things I’ve learned in 10 years in software engineering across #Nvidia → #Microsoft → #GoldmanSachs → #Amazon When I started out, I couldn’t have imagined where I’d be a decade later — different countries, industries, teams, and some incredibly smart people along the way. Looking back, these aren’t lessons I learned in a year or two. They only became clear with time. 1. Ask the “stupid” questions early When you’re new — to a role, company, or tech stack — you have leverage. Use it. Strong fundamentals compound far more than pretending you know everything. 2. Learn what success looks like to your manager Role guidelines are generic. Managers aren’t. Understanding what your manager values will accelerate your growth more than raw effort. 3. Don’t wait for your manager to map your career Managers can support you — but they won’t own your career for you. Be explicit about what you want and how they can help. 4. Take on the “dirty work” Legacy code. Flaky systems. Customer issues no one wants. These things build judgment, context, and trust — even if they don’t look glamorous. 5. Make yourself replaceable This sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true. Document. Share knowledge. Remove yourself as a bottleneck. The engineers who scale others scale themselves. 6. Learn from smart people — don’t compete with them You will work alongside people who are brilliant. Imposter syndrome is normal. Use it as a signal to learn, not to shrink or compare. 7. Build real relationships at work You spend too much of your life working to feel isolated. Seeing people as “just colleagues” often makes the journey lonelier than it needs to be. 8. Don’t burn bridges The industry is smaller than it looks. You’ll often cross paths with the same people again — sometimes in unexpected ways. 9. It’s okay to move on If growth stalls or curiosity pulls you elsewhere, listen. Comfort zones are quiet career killers. 10. Make mistakes — but don’t repeat them Mistakes are inevitable. Not learning from them is optional — and expensive. #SoftwareEngineering #CareerGrowth #BigTech #TechCareers #Leadership #EngineeringLife

I’m 40. Here are 23 things I wish I knew at 21 about being a good software engineer. (After spending 18+ years working as a software engineer at Amazon, Paytm, Google & startups) If you’re just starting out or in your 20s this might save you years of trial and error. 1. Don’t get attached to your code, someone else might see a better way. Real growth comes from letting your work be improved. 2. Every clever shortcut you add today can become a nightmare at 2 a.m. during on-call. Simplicity wins in the long run. 3. Fixing bugs on the surface is a temporary win. Solving root problems is what makes teams and products stronger over time. 4. Users don’t care about perfect code, they care about what works. Don’t lose sight of the real goal: delivering value. 5. Document your design decisions, even the small ones. Future-you (and your teammates) will thank you when debugging months later. 6. Every new line of code means more to maintain. Ask yourself if it’s really needed before hitting save. 7. Software is always evolving, there’s no “final version.” Embrace iteration and constant improvement. 8. Slow down and fully understand the problem before building. Rushing in usually means missing important details. 9. Clear, specific commit messages save hours when retracing what changed and why. Write them for your future self. 10. Every dependency you add is a potential source of bugs and pain later. Only include what’s essential. 11. Code reviews aren’t just for catching bugs, they’re for sharing ideas and building collective team knowledge. 12. Every technical decision has trade-offs. Always consider what you’re gaining and what you’re giving up. 13. Estimates are just guesses, not promises. Communicate the uncertainty and adapt as reality unfolds. 14. Release early, get feedback, and improve quickly. Waiting for perfection usually delays real progress. 15. Follow coding standards, they help teams move faster and avoid pointless debates. 16. Design with tomorrow in mind. The code you write today will almost always need to change later. 17. No one instantly understands code they didn’t write. Leave helpful comments and context for others (and yourself). 18. Don’t hesitate to ask for help. Even the best engineers get stuck, collaboration saves time and teaches you more. 19. Technology never stands still. Stay curious, keep learning, and don’t be afraid to admit what you don’t know. 20. Simple designs are easier to test, debug, and evolve. Resist the urge to add complexity for its own sake. 21. Your first solution is rarely your best one. Be ready to revisit, refine, and improve as you learn more. 22. Small, frequent improvements beat one big overhaul. Incremental progress adds up to major wins over time. 23. Take time to celebrate solved problems, but also to reflect on what could have gone smoother.

Who is the "worst" programmer you have ever worked with? If you look back far enough, the honest answer is usually "Me." We often think "bad programming" is just about syntax errors or slow typing, but the real career-killers are habits that prevent us from learning. Here are four specific "Bad Habits" that separate the amateurs from the professionals, and the lessons we need to learn from them: 1. Flying Without a Safety Net • The Habit: Early in my career, I lost an entire software contract because my hard drive failed, and I wasn't using Version Control. Later, I watched a colleague drop live production tables because he was trying to fix a bug in Prod rather than a test environment. • The Lesson: Mistakes are inevitable. Professionalism is about limiting the "blast radius" of those mistakes. If you aren't working in small steps with automated tests and version control, you aren't engineering; you are gambling. 2. Design Blindness • The Habit: I’ve seen a system with a single method called do_it that took 230 parameters. I’ve seen modern Java teams re-implementing 80-character limits because they were copying logic from 1970s punch cards. • The Lesson: Don't blindly follow a recipe. You need an internal model of why things work. If your code is painful to use, stop and ask if the constraints you are following are real, or just ghosts from the past. 3. Tool Illiteracy • The Habit: My friend Martin Thompson once found a high-performance system where logging cost more than the business logic. Why? The developers wrapped every line in a log statement because they didn't know how to use a debugger. • The Lesson: If you are writing code, learn your trade. Learn to use a debugger. Learn to use a profiler. Guesswork is expensive. 4. The "Fake It Till You Make It" Fraud • The Habit: The absolute worst example I ever saw was a consultant who billed premium rates for code reviews. In reality, he couldn't write Java. He was just running the code through a static analysis tool (which the client already owned) and pasting the output into a Word doc. • The Lesson: We have a duty of care. It is okay to not know something; it is not okay to defraud your team to hide your ignorance. The Bottom Line: Being a "bad" programmer isn't about making mistakes. We all make them. Being a good programmer is about organizing your work so that when you do make a mistake, you find it quickly, recover instantly, and learn immediately. #SoftwareEngineering #DevOps #Programming

Turns out "undefined" isn't a valid API key. Every 500 errors I’ve caused has taught me more than a successful deployment ever did. Backend engineering isn’t just about building systems. Sometimes, you break them, debug them, and learn. Here are 7 real mistakes that taught me more than any tutorial: 1. Forgot to set an environment variable: worked locally, blew up in prod. ✅ Don’t assume defaults exist ✅ Fail fast if critical configs are missing ✅ Validate env vars on startup—not after the app crashes 2. Didn’t handle a null or undefined field: classic edge case blind spot. ✅ Validate input and response data ✅ Use null-safe access patterns ✅ Add tests for edge cases 3. Relied on a 3rd-party API without a fallback: guess who had a bad day when it went down? ✅ Use retries with backoff ✅ Add fallback responses ✅ Gracefully degrade non-critical features 4. Improper timeout config: hello, hanging requests, and cascading failures. ✅ Set proper timeout values ✅ Handle timeout errors explicitly ✅ Monitor and tune under load 5. Race conditions in async code: everything’s fine... until it’s not under load. ✅ Avoid shared mutable state ✅ Use locks or atomic ops when needed ✅ Simulate load in test environments 6. Pushed a schema change without a data migration: and broke everything in 2 seconds. ✅ Pair schema changes with migrations ✅ Always test on staging with real data 7. Skipped input validation: the user sent a payload that wrecked my assumptions. ✅ Never trust client data ✅ Validate at the edge (API boundary) ✅ Enforce schemas and constraints You don’t become good by avoiding failure. You get there by surviving it. Failure isn’t a detour—it is the curriculum. Any lesson to add?

Anyone can design a system. Few stick around long enough to see where it breaks. Lesson 8: Work on projects for more than a year. It sounds simple, but it can be rare to get that experience, especially at big companies like Meta, Google, or Apple. Teams get reorged. Priorities change. People get moved around. It is rare to stick with a single project long enough to see it grow, evolve, and break. But if you ever get the opportunity, I highly recommend you stay. Because the truth is, you do not really learn from the decisions you make unless you are still around when those decisions are tested. System design, architecture, infrastructure — all of it sounds great on paper. But real-world flaws do not show up until a system gets large, messy, and stressed at scale. You will not understand what makes code truly extensible until you see it evolve. You will not notice bad cloud setups until you have to scale or migrate them. You will not learn how fragile some architecture decisions are until you have to live with them for years, not months. Working on something long term forces you to deal with the real consequences of your choices. And that experience is what makes you a much stronger engineer over time. I am sharing 40 lessons from 10 years of software engineering. Follow along so you do not miss the next ones

14 lessons I learned about working with large distributed systems in the last 8 years of my career at Google, Cisco and DELL EMC. I love exploring system design & distributed systems. These are the insights I would give to my younger self If I were starting again: 1. Infrastructure Health Monitoring    - Monitor CPU utilization, memory usage, and other basics.    - Ensure auto-scaling and proactive alerting when resources are overloaded. 2. Service Health Monitoring: Traffic, Errors, and Latency    - Track traffic volume, error rates, and response times.    - Focus on latency percentiles (p95, p99) for a more accurate user experience. 3. Business Metrics Monitoring    - Track key business events to ensure the system enables "business as usual."    - Customize business metrics for specific services, such as payments. 4. Oncall and Anomaly Detection    - Teams should own their services, including the oncall responsibilities.    - Use machine learning for anomaly detection to reduce false positives. 5. Efficient Alerting    - Set thresholds for actionable alerts to avoid burning out on-call engineers.    - Regularly review alerts and tag non-actionable ones for future adjustment. 6. Runbooks for Mitigation    - Always have updated runbooks for common outages.    - Ensure mitigation steps are easy to follow, even for engineers unfamiliar with the system. 7. Outage Communication    - Establish clear channels for communicating outages across teams.    - Use central chat groups for faster, collaborative incident resolution. 8. Mitigate First, Investigate Later    - Focus on rolling back changes during outages instead of deploying fixes in haste.    - Root cause analysis can wait until after the incident is resolved. 9. Blameless Postmortems    - Investigate outages without assigning blame and identify root causes.    - Use techniques like the "5 Whys" to get to the heart of the issue. 10. Incident Reviews    - Have senior engineers and management review severe incidents.    - Ensure accountability for implementing system-level improvements. 11. Failover Drills and Capacity Planning    - Regularly test data center failovers to ensure services can handle increased traffic.    - Plan for future traffic with accurate capacity forecasting to avoid resource bottlenecks. 12. Blackbox Testing    - Simulate real user flows to ensure systems function correctly in real-world scenarios.    - Use blackbox tests for quick feedback during failover drills. 13. SLOs and SLAs    - Define service-level objectives (SLOs) for capacity, latency, and availability.    - Regularly measure and report on SLOs to ensure system performance is on track. 14. SRE Team Involvement    - Dedicated SRE teams should manage monitoring, alerting, and incident reviews.    - SREs ensure system reliability through failover drills, black box tests, and capacity planning.

10 Years in Programming & Development — Here’s What I’ve Learned 10 years. Countless lines of code. More lessons than I can count. Here’s the truth: Programming and software development aren’t just about writing code. They’re about people, processes, and progress. Remember, programming or software development is broad — it’s more than just coding; it’s problem-solving, collaborating, and continuously learning to build solutions that make an impact. If I could go back and share some advice with my younger self, these are the 5 key takeaways I’d give: 1. Simplicity wins every time. The best solutions are usually the simplest. Overcomplicating code or architecture creates headaches later. Build smart. Build simple. 2. Communication > Code. Great programmers write clean code. Exceptional developers communicate effectively with their teams, clients, and stakeholders. Learn to bridge the gap. 3. Tools change, principles don’t. Languages, frameworks, and trends come and go. But good practices — clean code, scalability, testing — never go out of style. Master the fundamentals. 4. Fail fast, learn faster. Not every project will succeed, and that’s okay. Failing quickly and iterating is where the real growth happens. 5. Surround yourself with smarter people. The most growth I’ve experienced came from working with people who challenged me, mentored me, and pushed me out of my comfort zone. Never be the smartest in the room. 10 years later, I’m still learning, evolving, and growing. If you’re in programming or software development — or just starting out — here’s my advice: Stay curious, stay humble, and keep building. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in your programming journey? I’d love to hear it. 👇 #Programming #Development #TechJourney #LessonsLearned #GrowthMindset #farhantahir #strategisthub

The best lessons in software engineering come from things breaking. Nothing teaches you more than seeing a system fail in real-time. Yeah, it’s tough for the business, but from a growth perspective? Nothing comes close. Production failures are the real teachers. Watching experienced engineers handle incidents calmly, breaking down problems under pressure, that’s the stuff that sticks with you. It’s not something you learn from a course or a book. Postmortems are goldmines. I’ve read through RCAs from every outage I’ve been involved in. They’re packed with insights—unusual bugs, system quirks, and optimization tricks. Every postmortem is like finding treasure for a curious mind. If you want to grow fast, don’t skip on-call duty. It might seem scary at first, but the exposure you get is unbeatable. You learn how systems break, how to fix them, and how to communicate under pressure. One tip: Write down your learning from each incident. Over time, you’ll have a personal playbook, full of real lessons that will help you handle similar issues with confidence. There’s no better way to grow as an engineer. Dive in, get your hands dirty, and learn from every failure. It’ll make you sharper, smarter, and ready for anything.