This post contains some of the lessons I’ve learned in the past decade of growing my career. I hope they resonate with engineers of all levels, and help early to mid-level software engineers advance their careers. Some of the lessons may seem to be stating the obvious (eg “be organized”, “communicate effectively”), but spelling out exactly what they mean can provide the focus needed to make meaningful advances. Others are not as intuitive, but are instrumental in growing your skills and impact. You don’t have to be great at every one of these areas, but every little bit helps.

Don’t let code intimidate you

Documentation…

Protocol buffers are a mechanism for sending data through the series of tubes known as the Internet. One common use of them is to define gRPC specifications — essentially a form of remote procedure calls. With gRPC service definitions, you create a “service” that has RPC methods. These RPC methods take a request “message” and return a response “message”.

service FooService {
  rpc GetFoo (GetFooRequest) returns (GetFooResponse);
}message GetFooRequest {
  string id = 1;
}message GetFooResponse {
  string fooName = 1;
  int64 fooValue = 2;
}

Protobuf and gRPC are powerful tools and can be used in a…

Spring is a popular Java framework that is often used to build web applications. One of the features it provides is what it calls “Inversion of Control” — essentially dependency injection, similar to that provided by Guice. That said, Guice DI and Spring IoC have some subtle differences; this article is aimed at Java developers familiar with Guice, to provide a perspective on Spring IoC from the perspective of Guice DI.

Inject/Autowired
Dependency injection in Guice is done using the @Inject annotation. This can be applied to constructors, setters, and fields. …