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SE · written course

How software is actually built, shipped and kept running

Building something a team can still change in three years.

Start reading32 pages · about 174 minutes

By the end of this course

The part of the job that no course covers and every team assumes you know: how work arrives, what a reviewer is looking for, what to test and what not to, why a deploy is not a release, how to design something that survives its dependencies failing, and how to hand it over. By the end you can take part in a standup, a review and an incident without bluffing.

All 32 pages

  1. 1The feature that took six weeks and nobody used5 min read
  2. 2Where the work comes from5 min read
  3. 3Finding out what is actually needed5 min read
  4. 4The branch that would not merge5 min read
  5. 5What a reviewer is actually looking for5 min read
  6. 6The reader is the constraint5 min read
  7. 7Letting machines do the boring review5 min read
  8. 8The test suite nobody trusted6 min read
  9. 9Finding a bug on purpose5 min read
  10. 10Deploying is not releasing6 min read
  11. 11Why it works on your machine5 min read
  12. 12The API you cannot take back6 min read
  13. 13Designing from the numbers, not the diagram6 min read
  14. 14Monolith, services, and the honest comparison6 min read
  15. 15What breaks first, and in what order6 min read
  16. 16What the database does under load6 min read
  17. 17Two ways to stop doing work now5 min read
  18. 18When the answer depends on who you ask6 min read
  19. 19Everything you depend on will fail6 min read
  20. 20Making something faster, on purpose5 min read
  21. 21Knowing what your system is doing5 min read
  22. 22Working through an incident6 min read
  23. 23The handful of mistakes behind most breaches6 min read
  24. 24The vulnerabilities you will actually meet6 min read
  25. 25Engineering decisions have a price5 min read
  26. 26Arriving at a hundred thousand lines5 min read
  27. 27Writing for the person who comes next5 min read
  28. 28Using and contributing to other people's code5 min read
  29. 29The estimate, the disagreement, and the handover6 min read
  30. 30The part nobody teaches5 min read
  31. 31What gets better after the first job5 min read
  32. 32What the rounds are actually testing6 min read

Then what

Reading is the first half. When you finish, the questions for this subject test whether it went in, and every wrong option tells you why it was wrong rather than just that it was.

See the questions for SE