Whether you want to be a better engineer, or you want your company to hire better engineers, the path is the same: you need to be improving. For engineers this means increasing certain skills around programming, development, and systems. For companies, it's about having the right engineering culture for your point in the company journey, and this won't be fixed i.e. you need adaptable leaders.

Recommended Resources

Becoming a better programmer is all about practice, practice, practice. Try to solve the problems on your own to begin with, without help, or AI tools.

• Advent Of Code - https://adventofcode.com/ | Join the r/adventofcode community for help if you get stuck https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/.
• Project Euler - https://projecteuler.net/
• HackerRank - https://www.hackerrank.com/

Recommended Books

• Accelerate by Forsgren, Humble, Kim | Statistical analysis of the behaviours and practices used by the most successful teams.
• Good To Great by Jim Collins | The practices that may help a company to achieve initial success are not necessarily the ones that will sustain it through more advanced stages of growth. This book emphasizes the need for continuous adaptation, rigorous discipline, and a clear vision for the future.
• The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas | Developing code is more than just programming skill. Learn some of the pragmatic, soft skills needed to become a great software engineer.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson, Sussman, Sussman | If developing programming skill is about practice, this classic book provides the theory to direct where to practice next.
• Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnsson, Vlissides | The classic "Gang of Four" book on common design patterns in software.
• Head First Design Patterns by Freeman, Robson | Alternative to the classic, this book uses different methods of presenting the information in a way they claim is "brain-friendly".
• The Software Engineer's Guidebook by Gergely Orosz | Helps set out the skills required for engineers at various stages in their career, up to and including management, or continuing on the individual contributor path to more strategic, company wide positions.
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann | How to design distributed software systems with an eye on reliability, scalability, and maintainability, as well as many other key operational characteristics for modern internet economy services.

Links to items mentioned in the episode

• Do Things That Don't Scale by Paul Graham - https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
• Why Software Is Eating The World by Marc Andreessen - https://genius.com/Marc-andreessen-why-software-is-eating-the-world-annotated
• WCAG Compliance - https://wcag.com/resource/what-is-wcag/
• Code Golf - https://code.golf/

Interviewing is hard and random (so don't let it get you down)

• I Cheated on My Microsoft Interview by Robert Sweeney [https://www.facet.net/posts/i-cheated-on-my-microsoft-interview]
• "...can't invert a binary tree..." by @mxcl [https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768]

Thanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.