Notes on Staff Projects, Find your voice, and Never Rewrite
Read along with me by viewing my annotated highlights on working as a Staff+ engineer and catch up on the best content I consumed in the last week.
Read and respond to my notes on a Principal Engineer's thoughts on Staff+ work at Google and the idea that Senior Engineers must complete a"Staff Project" for promotion.
Principal Software Engineer at Google - Adam Bender on staffeng.com
Question for Staff+ Did you do a “Staff Project”? Did it land perfectly or need some refinement?
I talked a little about the experience of my “Staff Project” in the annotated notes in the link above.
TLDR is that Staff Projects are big and ambitious and typically involve a lot of communication, planning, and reflection in hindsight on what could have gone better.
The Best of What I Read Last Week
This is a curated list of reads from last week. It is not exhaustive, in any order, or based on what was actually published last week. This list is content that I consumed and felt worth sharing with people who would read my newsletter.
Never Rewrite - Episode 46: Workshopping Solutions for a Growing CRM SaaS product
Last week I was on the Never Rewrite Podcast with Isaac Askew and Jeffrey Sherman discussing scale and quality issues for a CRM SaaS. Check out the chapter list below to jump straight to a topic you’re interested in:
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
01:12 The Current State of the White Label CRM
06:11 Goals and Expectations for the Project
07:54 User Trust and Importance of the CRM
10:44 Focus on Email and SMS Issues
13:30 Importance of User Support and Community
16:36 Email and SMS Deliverability Challenges
19:46 Database Structure and Performance Challenges
20:13 Improving Write Efficiency
21:02 Using SQS and SNS for Message Queuing
22:03 Controlling Flow with Multiple Readers
23:05 Writing to Separate Databases
24:01 Tracking Heavy Queries
25:37 Separating Permissions and Heavy Reads
26:08 Caching with Redis
27:05 Improving Email Service Reliability
29:02 Monitoring and Alerting
30:28 Improving Data Logging and Validation
32:15 Implementing a Defined Process for Email Service
33:09 Recording and Rebuilding Failed Email Requests
35:11 Setting Up Aggregated Logs and Monitoring
Thanks for reading!