An engineer’s year worth of progress

I love new beginnings. It means a clean slate, fresh headspace, and above all it means when I begin tracking progress, I’ll be able to capture everything from start to finish. Becoming a software engineer at Mixpanel was no exception. In April 2018, I transferred from support engineering to software engineering on a transition path four months prior. I’m lucky and fortunate to have leadership who believed in me and a team who give me confidence. For the full year, I’ve been tracking various time and Github data and I thought I’d share my results to start a conversation and be completely transparent about how engineers spend their time, and how some aspects of their code changes over time.

There are many facets to progress and being a better engineer, and at Mixpanel we focus on technical ability, technical leadership, and teamwork. For the sake of quantification (and since I’m still early in my career), I focus the analysis loosely on technical ability, relying on a mixture of Github statistics and time logging, of which you can look at my methodology in “A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years”.

I took the data and made a bunch of graphs, and you can see the Mixpanel data version in the Mixpanel Engineering Blog and/or an extended version with other graphs, time analysis, and full methodology on my website. I’m still writing and doing crazy analyses like this that you can look forward to.

What do you think about the data and the conclusions I’ve presented there? How would you track progress? I hope the article inspires someone out there to track their data and draw more conclusions that can help the engineering community.