Book Club Questions: The Software Engineer's Guidebook
Contents
Today is day 1 of #blogvent, where I’m writing a blog post every day for the month of December. Shoutout to @cassidoo for the idea!
I loved this book, and a full summary and review of it is sure to come shortly. However I wanted to share some of the book club discussion questions for this book that we came up with for anyone else looking to organize a book club for this book.
About Our Book Club
I’m in a book club at work that focuses on technical and career development books. Meeting with the folks in the book club regularly is lovely, but the real value of the book club is in keeping me accountable to do the reading and providing new perspectives on what we have read.
Book Club Questions
Part One: Developer Career Fundamentals
- What was your career path to get here? What are your ambitions for where you want to go in your career?
- What differences have you noticed when working in different types of tech companies?
- Do you keep a work log? What goes in it?
- What are examples of good or bad feedback you have received?
- What has been helpful for you when preparing for performance reviews?
- Do you have any experience with the promotion process here? What has been helpful for you?
- Do you consider yourself a product-minded engineer or a platform engineer? Or something in between?
- Did you read the bonus chapter “Working at a Startup vs in Big Tech”? Any takeaways from it?
Part Two: The Competent Software Developer
- What is something that always helps you when you’re blocked?
- What sorts of things do you do to take the initiative on your team?
- What are your tips for doing good code reviews?
- How do you practice coding?
- What are your thoughts on code readability and quality?
- How do you go deep on learning the specifics of a language?
- How do you approach refactoring?
- Are there any tools that you particularly like using that you want to share?
- What is helpful to you when creating PRs?
Part Three: The Well-Rounded Senior Engineer
- What is your method of communicating the work that you complete?
- Explain how you make sure your code review quality is high?
- When and how often do you pair program?
- Describe your experience with mentoring, both formal and informal
- How do you get to know other people in the company in this remote environment?
- How do you prioritize and pay down tech debt?
- How do you prioritize writing and reviewing documentation?
- Do you prefer writing more unit tests or writing more integration tests?
- Describe your experience with writing ADRs and RFCs
- Describe your experience with prototyping/spiking
Part Four: The Pragmatic Tech Lead
- What are some recent experiences you’ve had with dealing with a project risk? What kind of a risk was it? How did you identify and handle it?
- What are your favorite ways to start and end a project?
- What do you find helpful in keeping everyone on the same page throughout a project?
- Have you ever been a part of an unhealthy team? How did you respond?
Part Five: Role-Model Staff and Principal Engineers
- What key performance indicators and OKRs do you know of and are tracked in your area of the organization?
- Which business stakeholders do you hold regular meetings with (or do you want to, after reading this chapter)?
- How have you learned more about “The Business”?
- Does your team have a “definition of done”? Or other related team agreements?
- Have you seen good or bad examples on handling alerting or monitoring that you’d like to share?
- Are you interested in following the staff+ engineer path and what skills are you building now to prepare for it?