Good luck with your journey. Hoping to read more soon.

Interesting levels; I liked how everything is spelled out to be unambiguous (I also saw the drive sheet). In your opinion, have you had candidates that did both the technical and the engineering management track?

Wanted to add that Pydantic has helped me structure a lot of business logic code as well, and they become much more easy to document and maintain by people who didn’t develop it. There’s a lot of long-term value in terms of maintainability and this velocity of adding new features.

Denis Khodishchenko you’re right. I meant to say co-routines.

Totally agree with the foundational knowledge piece. It takes time to acquire it, and it doesn’t give rewards very soon. But it does allow you to handle unfamiliar territory better than others. Combining it with networking is a deadly combination.

Async also has this problem where if you schedule too many green threads within a request and you get may requests, the scheduler may not be smart enough to prioritise requests that are almost ready with their responses, etc.

All good points. I’ve learnt over the years that ideas tend to themselves be a leaky abstraction and a good engineer can help “manage” that leak if not eliminate them. The iterative building of features is another important point because it keeps your business viable with those smaller milestones while you reach the grand goal.

I wrote my very first blog post in 2005 on Blogspot as a kid. I cringe whenever I look at it today, but the other kids liked what I wrote. So you're spot on that one does not have to be an industry veteran to write a blog. But yeah, sometimes it's hard to suppress that inner voice.

One thing that is often missing is the art of engineering itself. I started writing code as a kid, and a lot has changed in terms of technologies, syntaxes, paradigms, frameworks, etc. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle change, but not the art of putting them together. Unfortunately, that art is not always visible, because when someone opens code, they see syntax rather than design. I think that invisible art is something that gets missed when myopically focusing on specific technologies or frameworks.

I was curious about what your tech stack was going to be for the email project and then found this post. All of them look like good decisions. It was also a good reminder of what it takes to build a good product. So many moving parts coming together.