EPISODE SUMMARY
On this episode I got the chance to chat with an 18 year veteran in the industry, Site Reliability engineer Josh Dewald. We cover things like how to identify and overcome impostor syndrome, finding a love for debugging and the problem solving process and the importance of finding mentors to guide you through your journey.
EPISODE NOTES
Key topics covered:
- Finding a love for the debugging process.
- The importance leadership that values exploration, communication and testing.
- It is ok to make mistakes. The key, learning from your mistakes. Humans are fallible, plan for that.
- Imposter syndrome is real, but it's ok, ask questions.
- Taking initiative to find the "interesting stuff" at your company, find your niche.
- Lean into admitting when you don't know something.
- Look for mentors & learn from them, often they'll love being able to share what they've learned.
- Our fundamental job is to solve problems, not to write code.
- Recognize design and systems patterns, what the key components of a system are & how they fit together.
- Observability → Figuring out key metrics that impact your team.
- Visualize and plan before diving in.
Three biggest takeaways
- Find a mentor or mentors. Someone you can talk to and get advice from.
- Learn to love troubleshooting and debugging. Don't think that your code should "work" the first time you learn it. Always question your assumptions.
- Don't get bogged down by the impostor syndrome. remember you're an engineer and you're solving problems.
Featuring
Josh DeWald — Twitter, Github, Linkedin, gmail: joshdewald@gmail.com
Andrew Locke — Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
Links
Sign up to be on the podcast
Code Complete
Notion for organizing dev docs