Learning Quickly Q&A and Videos

I am a Backend Engineer at a Platform Team.

Our team currently owns 9 micro services which serve as a platform which other teams use through the company.

5/9 of these services are actively being worked on and the rest are just running without any changes/ enhancements.

I have been working for the past 8 months on one of the services but haven’t had much exposure to others.

I want to learn about the others, how the data flows between them and how the overall system design is. I am just going through tons of design RFCs and reading code but with little understanding.

My primary motivation is to

1. Understand more of our scope and work on them.
2. Move out of my comfort zone.
3. Handle On Call tasks better where understanding code is needed more than just following runbook.

How can I better understand at the service level?

Big companies have multiple teams across. There will be a team just for the login, a team for backend logic, etc. There are so many teams and microservices and internal jargon all around.

Problem is during team meeting, seniors have more in depth discussion where I'm unable to provide value as good as them.

How do I get familiar with them fast? Or am I focusing on the wrong idea and should just narrow down what I'm working on and just let time do its thing?

Thanks

Everyone has heard of the 80/20 rule. I was wondering as an intern / junior engineer, what are the few things that I need to do that will give me the most impact on my career prospects?

I joined Tiktok coming from not such a big company & fast culture. I had two projects where I needed to read massive code bases for tasks. The code base is in C++. A language I haven't used in years. How should I go about it?

Should I spend time learning the language before diving into the code or otherwise? I feel under-confident; other engineers scan & understand code even when they don't know the language too well.

The context: I am looking for a startup to join and realized that most of the opportunities are with NodeJS and TypeScript.

I've been working mostly with .NET for quite some time but JS/TS are not new to me. In fact, TS is written by Microsoft and probably because of that, the syntax is very close to C#. So, I don't see big issue here. But NodeJS is a different world. I have some professional experience with it but don't know it deeply.

I understand if you are a good SWE the stack doesn't matter that much. But we are talking about finding a job here. I will have to convince the interviewer I can do it. And the questions will go for sure deeply about Node env. My motto is if the interview is tough, there is a higher chance that there will be more talented people than usual. But tough interview will make it even more impossible to me.

What are the opportunities?

1. Learning it for few months myself? I am sure will help me to understand it better but it's not like having years of experience with Node.
2. Applying for non-senior positions, sacrificing the payment but learning? I am not sure this is possible actually.

Or smth else?

I just joined a brand new team, formed 6 weeks ago. This job is a big step up in responsibility for me, and it's asking me to operate in a manner that I'm unfamiliar with, such as building OKRs and roadmaps for my team - these OKRs and roadmaps will then be used by our cross functional partners. I feel an immense sense of responsibility that I'm not sure I can uphold my end of the bargain, since I feel like I simply there's so much unknown around product requirements and technical constraints. I don't know if I just power through it by working more to discover some of these constraints (which is what I'm mostly trying to do right now).

For the record, my manager says I'm doing great having recently joined the team. However, I constantly feel like I'm behind because I think I should be giving everyone the feeling I've got things under control, but I don't think I'm giving that impression (because that's not true...). How do I deal with this feeling? I feel like I will be feeling this way for some time since I think I have a lot to learn...

How would you spend you first 30 days to achieve the an impactful start (ideally from a staff perspective):

• What would you prioritize?
• What questions would you ask?
• When given your first tasks, what additional/beyond scope extras would you consider?
• What would you be mindful of NOT to do?
• How would you start prepping to figure out what to become an SME in?

My was “When given a take-home assignment, what is a reasonable turnaround time to get it back to them?” I now know it’s within a week.

I was given the assignment to create a basic Django app and was told to spend no more than 3 hours on it. Here’s the short text of the assignment description:

Table Metadata Extractor (Python)

Please provide a Python Django application that has one API endpoint which accepts a database connection string from your DB of choice (Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, MySQL, Postgres), connects to the database using and returns a list of the TableMetadata data objects (see below) for all tables in the database.

TableMetadata = {

columns: List[ColumnMetadata]

num_rows: int

schema: str

database: str

}

ColumnMetadata = {

col_name: str

col_type: str

}

Bonus points for:

·         Instructive error messages for improper connection strings or other invalid input

·         A solution that is efficient

As a Data Engineer/Analyst, I haven’t done web-dev stuff in years and have never used Django. My immediate instinct upon reading this project description was to find a resource to learn Django online. I’m not sure this is the right instinct, because software is about doing more than learning as Alex has mentioned so many times.

The way I see it, I have 3 ways to approach this assignment:

1. The way I just mentioned. Go down a learning path (hopefully not a rabbit hole), learn about Django and try completing the assignment.
2. Dive right in, try building the solution from scratch, Googling and ChatGPTing liberally.
3. Don’t do the assignment, spare myself the time and headache, and beef up my Python web-dev skills for the future.

The first approach requires the most upfront time. The second might be longer or shorter than the first. And the third doesn’t require any upfront time but requires a commitment to being in a much better position to do the assignment in future.

This is the second time in a couple of months I’ve been in this position since I was given an assignment for a different company to build a Flask app and did a shoddy job with it.

My first question is, which of the 3 options should I do to address this time-sensitive situation?

My second is, how should I address this situation long-term? Building some web-dev projects in Python with Flask/Django/FastAPI seems pretty logical. I don’t get to work with them at work, but I could spend a few weeks building stuff with them. I guess that’s the answer, the key is to avoid tutorial hell.

My third is, how should I think about take-home assignments in general? Should they stretch me a lot in terms of learning new things or conversely, should I be, say, 80% comfortable with what I need to do, just stretching a bit here and there to do stuff?

Thanks!

I have been looking to switch tech stacks for a while now and although i have made progress in upskilling, its quite a slow process. Work responsibilities always take over and leaves me little time for my own learning or side projects. Also i feel like there are tons of things to learn every single time i sit down. Could you help me with some tips to go about learning and deal with overwhelm when it comes to learning in tech?

Also, another reason this is hard is because the reward I get for spending more time on office work is immediate and helps me feel safe in terms of job security, but of course in the longer run it wont keep me happy which is why i need to spend more time on my education outside of work.

Thanks!

Often times, I find myself finishing stories assigned to me. However, I research only what is required for that task. This approach hasn’t helped me call myself an expert in it. And eventually I even forget what I had learnt. How do you approach a situation like this? It feels like I am doing tasks but not getting anywhere.

Maybe try to limit to one recommendation to fuel the discussion

I'll kick it off.

The Unfair Advantage by Ash Ali & Hasan Kubba

Audiobook: Yes (Audible)
Synopsis:

Like a video game character, each of us have innate advantages and disadvantages and this book is about how those can be leveraged to stick out from the competition or how your mindset can be shifted to flip what you think is just a disadvantage into a secret advantage!

First of all, I'm a huge fan of Alex & Rahul and I want to grow in this community together with mentors, seniors & humans.

But lately being in meetings I've stopped asking much more questions to my seniors because they come with limited knowledge whereas GPT can follow up with me can guide me expertly. Whereas it can even give me expert advise in tech career growth and many such areas.

Even I don't even open stack overflow now.

The question I had was regarding building side projects such as a calculator using a tutorial and then modifying it to make it unique.  Is it okay to use ChatGPT or Github copilot to add those modifications or should I try coding those modifications on my own so that I gain better lower level programming skills?

I'm currently working pretty long hours on the weekdays to boost my learning speed, but I know that this isn't sustainable. I feel like my micro-routines can be improved: How can I get the most out of each day? I'm also fairly new to the company, and I want to set myself up for a senior level promotion ASAP - These are 2 big reasons why this is very important to me right now.