My Software Engineering Tenets

Through the course of my career, I’ve developed a set of tenets, or core values, for myself that I like to remind myself of every day before easing into the flow of work. It has to do with motivation, as well as identity sculpting – sculpting who I am through thoughts and through consciously working toward incorporating these tenets into my day to day life.

1. I build things. If working on a legacy system, I build things that help work with or test the system.
2. I innovate to improve my customers’ and co-workers’ lives. I provide value to them. I serve them. I produce impact.
3. I solve business problems for my customers, and bring their ideas to life.
4. I automate to make mine and my co-workers’ lives easier.
5. I strive to improve the strategic design of the system when implementing features; I don’t just apply tactical quick fixes that increase complexity and entropy.
6. While coding, I try to work incrementally, adding one small change and keeping tests/systems running.
7. I get early input, work in the open, and contribute incremental bits
8. Every line of code that I write is my message to other smart people of posterity. Not only do I want to help them carry this work forward, but also I want them to appreciate how elegant a piece of work I did.
9. I spend the majority of my time in the Eisenhower Matrix Q2, aka long term important tasks that are not urgent.
10. I prioritize relentlessly and always work on the most important tasks available.