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What makes a good senior engineer
I am often challenged to explain what makes a good senior software engineer and how does someone progress to this level. Does the number of years count? What about knowing the latest technology buzzwords? The topic has been debated on many forums and many in the industry have shared their viewpoints on a topic that is quite broad. …
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Quick Performance Indicators (QPI)
My entire career as a software engineer I have constantly debated the idea of key performance indicators (KPIs) and how these are applied in software engineering. In my experience, most tech based companies use a generic KPI model to the measure the performance of their software engineers. Measuring the performance of software engineers is almost as challenging as keeping up with the latest changes in technology. There are many reasons for this, from the type of software created to the type of problems that are solved. When I started out in high school writing Turbo Pascal, success was measured by the number of lines of code our programs had. The more code you had the better your program was, 10000 lines of code (LOC) meant bragging rights. …
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Big Data
When I was a junior, I proudly said in an interview that I work with 50gb sql server databases. We’ll at that time storage was expensive and this constituted big data for many. Moving some years in the future, and looking at the no sql, big data revolution, it is amazing how far we have come. …
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Interviews and the art of FizzBuzz
I have recently had to conduct interviews for developers at my place of work. I am responsible for the tech side of the interview which involves the technical questions and some simple coding. …