Mentor for Software Engineers

Guide for Software Engineers Early in Their Careers 

Introduction: 

• Get to know each other

• Understand the areas of interest and your aspirations

• Understand what drives you

Software Engineering Landscape: 

• Go to basics and understand where your knowledge is and what the gaps are

• Scratch the surface of the area of interest and talk about what the real industry does in this area

Software Architecture: 

• Basic examples of different architectures/implementations

  • Monolith and Microservice implementations

  • DDD (Domain-Driven Design)

  • Streaming implementations

  • Caching

  • Event-driven microservice implementation

  • CQRS and Event Sourcing and CQRS concepts without traditional even sourcing 

  • Gateway implementations and Platform-ization of your services

  • Server-driven UI

  • REST, GraphQL, gRPC

  • Observability and overall Monitoring approaches

  • Concept of Near-time healing/correction in the distributed microservice implementation

  • Database choice (SQL vs. NoSQL) and CAP Theorem 

  • Anomalies in databases 

  • Batch processing

  • Analytics pipeline and ability to stitch data together

  • Telemetry 

  • Microservice complexity and dependency analysis importance

• WHY certain architectures and implementations exist

Software Development Methodologies, Modularizing your code, Clean Code: 

• Modularizing your code (functional thinking)

• Unit-testing goal 

• Less configuration, more IoC

• Error handling vs. Exception handling

• Time-outs, circuit-breakers, reactive programming

• Feature Toggles

• Main-trunk development

• Tracer-bullet methodology (UX, FrontEnd, BackEnd, QA integrations from day zero)

• Quality and Automation

• Minimalist vs. non-minimalist approach to software engineering (advantages and disadvantages)

• Scaling and handling traffic during flash sales

• Algorithms and Design Patterns

CI/CD and DevOps mindset: 

• Why you need to streamline things?

• Ability to integrate often, small and quickly

• Ability to deploy often, deploy while mitigating risks

AI/ML:

• Biggest misconceptions about AI/ML 

• AI/ML in a nutshell and what you can solve and why

• Tools and approaches to productionalize your machine learning implementations

Cloud:

• DevOps mindset

• Why and what does it give you? What was the original promise of the cloud and were we are at now?

• What you have to watch out for

• Containers and why

The Craft of Programming and Software Engineering & The Learning Culture:

• Curiosity and hunger to make things better

• Passion for this craft

• Curiosity and hunger to make things better

• Being childlike and not childish or institutionalized 

• Software engineering books and their importance

• Podcasts

• Blogs

• Using Training/Tutorial platforms

Learning by Doing (this is where you apply the knowledge and learn by taking your solution through iterations): 

• Pick a problem to solve

• Follow through and execute in a phased approach following the practices we will cover here

Importance of Marketing Yourself: 

• LinkedIn profile and building your brand on LinkedIn via posts, articles and comments

• Blog platform (creating your blog on Medium.com or Substack.com and consistently blogging)

• Your Personal Website (Your website is the aggregate or reference into all your online presence)

• YouTube channel (starting your channel)

• Podcast (starting your podcast and publishing to Spotify and other podcast platforms)

Importance of going back to basics throughout your career: 

Refresh knowledge on the following: 

• Internet:

• • How does internet work

  • What is HTTP and DNS

  • How to set up a web/app server from scratch, secure it and connect it with your domain name

  • CORS?

• Security: 

• OWASP risk

• Hashing algorithms (No MD5, focus on bcrypt and similar)

• JWT Tokens

• OAuth2

• Other

• SQL vs. NoSQL

• CAP theorem

• Caching vs. Traditional databases