Not long ago I began writing code to remember what it was like to build things every day for users with the hope to build some empathy for my direct and indirect reports
After a few months of doing close to 30 minutes in the morning of daily coding I want to share what I have re-learned so far.
The temptation to deliver quickly is high, but maintaining a high quality standard requires patience, persistence and consistency.
I made an effort to write up a service canvas, detailed tickets explaining the work to my future self, used true and tried design patterns to keep the code maintainable, covered the code under test, and used sonar cloud to review my code for known vulnerabilities and other static analysis checks.
These and more are expected outputs of any software my teams write. Going through the steps and making an effort to understand the value provided has done wonders to create empathy for the challenges software engineers face daily.
Releasing code is more complex, there are vast options from multiple providers that can make it overwhelming at first, but new tooling like render.com made it simpler and provided a glimpse into a bright future for hosting options.
In short, we ask a lot of engineers and oftentimes, as leaders, we get too excited about the prospect of shipping fast, but we fail to realize that good engineering practices have tremendous value and take considerable time to go through.