I'm a curious Engineering Manager with 17+ years of experience in developing software and leading engineering teams. Having lived in 4 countries, I've developed a strong ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional and geo-distributed teams. Having worked across industries such as Retail, Telco, Manufacturing and Energy, enables me to drive customer success, business value, and engineering excellence.
You can find some of my work and projects on GitHub: https://github.com/syedhassaanahmed
- teach themselves multiple ways of solving the same problem and understand that code is just one of the many ways to achieve the solution.
- treat code as a liability, not an asset.
- prioritize building for current requirements over hypothetical future ones aka YAGNI
- consider the term best practices as relative. Since best practices constantly evolve over time, great engineers brace themselves to unlearn and re-learn.
- never settle in learning in-depth how something works.
- put people over processes.
- judge people on their contributions, not on how confident they seem.
- don't let their own desire to get things done quickly, turn into undue pressure on peers.
- recognize that out of all the agile practices commonly used, estimating work items and trying to measure project velocity is the least productive.
- acknowledge that new systems are best designed by a small number of minds, not committees.
- are aware that their team is only as good as the weakest code reviewer.
- are cautious when dealing with hyped/fashionable tech (e.g. Kubernetes) and understand that CS fundamentals don’t change much over time.
- ensure that all code must have good tests regardless if the tests were written first, last, or in the middle.
- have the same high standards for all the code they write, from tests, little scripts to the inner loop of critical system.
- deploy from main branch to prod from the very beginning of a project.
- automate all the things that are worth automating.
- know the importance of being able to tell what the system is doing, so they make sure it’s observable.
- As managers/leads, if things go well, they give their team the credit. If things go sideways, they take the blame themselves.
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent