Originally posted to LeadDev, duplicated here for archival purposes because Cool URIs don’t change.
It is unlikely that any other activity will have nearly the same amount of leverage as bringing a junior engineer up to speed so that they can successfully contribute. This is often more easily said than done. While team leads should be accountable for ensuring that this happens, many inexperienced leads often feel that this remit falls solely on them.
The current state of the web is poor… at best. Ads and tracking are out of control and have moved from just being a minor annoyance to being a real detriment to my user experience, whether in a browser or an app. Worse the tools to filter these things are getting worse. They’re woefully underpowered for mobile and on desktops it seems that the filtering tools that they did have is being scaled back. We’re not too far away from the bad old days when more trusting relatives would have dozens of spyware toolbars installed in their browsers.
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of being a guest on The Data Standard podcast. Catherine and I had a great conversation about data engineering vs application engineering and how they’re much more alike than different.
Being proficient with various *nix-style tools for working with plain text is a well known way to “level up” engineering skills. Efficiently using your editor of choice (vim or emacs), along with common command line tools like grep, awk, and less common ones like xxd and jq can lead to massive time savings. What a lot of people may not realize is that understanding how to use these tools and others like them is also engineering leadership superpower.
Happy holidays to all of you. I hope that you’re all able to take some time to rest and recharge to finish out the year.
Light and life.