I’m a software engineer now. I’ve noticed that I become a better engineer when I’m writing my learnings down. In this section of my newsletter I’ll post daily learnings as I work to become a fantastic software engineer.
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Vibes and squishy thoughts
It feels good to be an engineer, and a skilled engineer. I’d like to continue to build my capability to be one. I haven’t felt like this in a while.
It seems like the key traits I notice within engineers are 1) competency and 2) “yea, i can do that/i can learn it.”
Great engineers seem to have an enormously wide range of capabilities and skills. I notice this is surprising to me - I think this is because I expected there to be very specialized frontend engineers, backend engineers, people who fiddle with React and so forth. But the engineers in my community who I admire seem to have lots of different kinds of knowledge. Last week I asked the Fractal Tech discord for help with catching downtime on our site, and was super amazed and humbled by the helpful responses around observability and QA.
The power of an engineer is to be able to build anything with technology, to build robust technological systems that solve human problems, for joy and for economic value. This requires cultivating a set of technical skills, mindsets for learning and dealing with problems, and particular instincts to handle challenging emotions.
I notice that even spending a 30 minutes to work through the Django tutorial made me feel better about web development and returned some confidence that I feel I’ve been missing over the last few months. It feels like once again reactivating the mental states that make me good at my job - learning quickly, switching into “competence mode” and rapidly processing new information.
I notice that when my mind-body state inhabits “competent engineer” there are particular patterns of speech that I have (like saying short, clipped “sure”s a lot - thanks Andrew).
I notice that this can sometimes feel like a particular “tightness?” Wondering if I can later discover a way to access this competence through relaxed and open awareness. Peter Ralston, Nick Cammarata and some other Twitter people speak about doing strange things like scrolling your phone with open, lightly focused awareness.
In any case, the competent engineer mind-body state is fine because I want to feel good at my job, and want to feel like I’m enjoying it.
Whether I’m working as a PM or an engineer for the day, one of the things that’s helpful to me is producing a work output every day - a brief, a PR (or multiple), etc. Something I can point to and say, “I did that!”
I guess I’m seeking to connect back to my enjoyment of my work again. That’s the real journey here.
Learnings about Django
I’m learning to use Django. My raw notes and questions as I work through the Django tutorial:
manage.pyis a command line utility that lets me do various things with my Django projectwhat is ASGI and WSGI?
questions: why is there a WSGI interface needed to be defined for Python? why haven’t I heard of this for Express.js or the Typescript ecosystem? Are there comparable concepts? Is REST a comparable concept?
Looks like this is saying that asgi.py and wsgi.py are entry points for web servers to serve my project. Looks like Django is not strictly a webserver but a framework to manage much more than that.
Hm, they’re saying that what is being served is a Django development server - not a production server, like Apache. What is the distinction? What is the comparable concept in the Typescript ecosystem?
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.
while building trading systems, the approach we took was generating synthetic transactions on a periodic basis, in production, these transactions went all the way to the exchange. the trick was to use a real order with a test account and a real symbol that would be accepted by the exchange (for example ZVV). This is also referred as "Canary" testing with a goal to proactively surface issues with the system before users report it. another cool side effect was sometimes it ended up "warming" up the production nodes after nightly restarts before the market opens :-)
What excites me about coding atm is that you can literally build anything. That also happens to be what scares me the most 😅
But at the end of the day, it is about becoming a better engineer and both finding joy and creating value