Austin Hughes

Landmines in your software engineering career path: what NOT to do when applying for a role. Picture this: You've found your dream job listing. You're about to hit 'send' on your application. But wait. There's a minefield ahead that many don't see until it's too late. First, generic resumes. They scream, 'I didn't try.' Tailor your resume. Highlight projects and skills relevant to the job. Make them see you in the role before you even interview. Next, overlooking the cover letter. It's not just a formality. It's your narrative, your pitch, why YOU. Skipping it? Missed opportunity. Ignoring the company culture. Fit is a two-way street. A brilliant coder in the wrong environment becomes an unhappy coder. Research. Reflect. Does this place align with your values, your work style? Networking only when you need a job. Big mistake. Networking is about genuine connections, not just job hunting. Engage, share, be present. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Lastly, stopping learning. Tech evolves. So should you. Continuous learning shows you're adaptable, proactive. A huge plus. Avoid these pitfalls. Stand out for the right reasons. Engage below: What's one lesson you've learned from your job applications? Let's navigate this path together. #careerdevelopment #softwareengineer #winningresume

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Welcome Mitwa Patel to join Seradex as a co-op Software Developer in the spring/summer of 2024. During her tenure, she'll be working on converting Crystal reports to Telerik reports and adding test cases to QA automated testing for Windows-based ERP application. The new redesign report will remove imperfections, improve usability, and Seradex branding. The new test cases will be integrated into TestComplete which will be triggered by Azure DevOps pipeline. This integration will significantly reduce our manual testing timeline and inform any bugs to the developers immediately after auto-build and auto-deployment are completed. #ReportConversion #DataVisualization #QAautomation #AzureDevOps #TestComplete #ContinuousDevelopment #ContinuousIntegration

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I speak with several companies a week about a/b testing roadmaps + blockers. Couple consistent themes I'm hearing lately: Warehouse native experimentation- seeing a move towards teams running experimentation directly within their cloud warehouse. Teams value having a central source of truth, keeping data within their system, and having results available for secondary analysis. Buggy wysiwig editors- lots of teams run into flickering and assignment issues with their visual editors. The wysiwig promise is eng-free experimentation but delivery falls short and requires significant eng effort to debug. Saving analysts time- analysts fill different roles in different companies, but they’re often responsible for number crunching + dashboard building for homegrown experimentation. Time savings for repetitive and manual work has been a big push factor lately. Modularity- some folks come to us for The Whole Enchilada (feature gates, experimentation, product analytics) but most teams are looking for a modular solution that has low initial integration effort with the option to expand use cases later. #abtesting #experimentation

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When a user is checking out new software, every little thing seems to stand out. A single bug or issue can be a dealbreaker. It’s all about first impressions. If something doesn't sit right they won’t stick around. That’s why it’s important for software vendors to put their best foot forward. No one expects perfection on day one, but honesty goes a long way. Labeling specific features as a 'work in progress' or 'beta' can help manage expectations, especially when crucial items such as API Specs and unit tests are missing. It tells users that, yes, we’re still polishing things up, but we're on it! Once users see the real value, they tend to be more forgiving. They might even stick around to see what comes next, especially if they believe in where you're headed. It's all about setting the right expectations. If you’re open about where your software is at, people are more likely to trust you and give you the time to get it right.  

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A grizzled old sales rep once told me he called his backlog of system requests to his IT department "NGDs -- never gets done." Low-code platforms offer a way to manage down this backlog of "NGDs" quickly and efficiently. I have seen stats saying that up to 75% of companies are using low-code to maintain or modernize their business applications. The question is: how extensive is this usage? My own interaction with customers suggests that low-code platforms, despite their utility and despite this superficially high number, are still way under-adopted. I believe the reasons for this under-adoption are cultural and structural. Low-code was supposed to create a new generation of "citizen developers," but I have yet to see many citizen developers in practice. Conversely, developer-developers remain wedded to their preferred tools and programming languages, which can be a source of both career satisfaction and job security. In sum, there is no skilled, motivated population driving the adoption of low-code in the enterprise. Companies that want to realize the value of low-code will need an explicit organizational strategy for doing so, encompassing job roles, training, and incentives that support and encourage its use. I have linked to Gartner's recent (October 2023) ranking of low-code platforms. Our own Power Platform is ranked high in the Leader quadrant due to advantages like interoperability and governance. Read the full report for a review of all relevant vendors. https://lnkd.in/e7zdns64

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Let's have some fun this morning. What are the top 5 features that you wish were in: 💿 Flow 💿 Apex Let's hear what features you're craving and why. Perhaps what you would solve with it? Bonus points for those out there for outside of the box thinking (i.e. swap Apex in favor of Typescript). #salesforce #businesssystems #salesforcedevelopers #salesforceadmins

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Mentoring works both ways... This may come as a surprise, but I'm a little opinionated. As a result I'm fortunate in that I get to participate in a lot of what I will call "leadership guidance". Recently I was involved in some technical enablement discussions. Standard fare stuff. How does Cisco continue to maintain technical competency with our Solution Engineers. An observation that was made by the group is that we have 5 generations of engineers, all of whom learn very differently. That's when we looked at the group and came to a realization. We are all old. Er, I mean late in career. 👴😆 Now that wasn't really deliberate. It's how these things go. It's common practice for leaders to reach out to their tenured engineers to remain grounded. Nothing nefarious. No intent for lack of diversity. We've all been around the block, we aren't shy about sharing our opinions thus we're the folks leadership will reach out to when they need feedback. The nice thing about Cisco is that the culture here recognizes diversity. In our case, sure it's easy for our generation to opine about how best to do this, but we realized we needed additional, and potentially different, perspectives. And that's when I said "I know some folks" I've talked before about the mentoring I do. It's one of the things I enjoy the most about my job. But in this situation I was able to turn that mentoring relationship around and ask them for 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 advice and feedback. I needed 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 to mentor 𝘮𝘦. What of our ideas sound good? Which need improvement? What did we miss that we need to address? Which were just not good and needed to be scrapped? To their credit, they all had great ideas and feedback that we were able to factor into the decision making process. Cisco will be better moving forward as a result. You read all kinds of press about how the younger generations just don't have the work ethic other generations did. I gotta say, if the folks I have been blessed to mentor are an indication, we're gonna be just fine as they move into leadership roles.

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I will be the first to say that I am biased, but I have to talk to someone about how much I love our OpenAPI docs. ❤️ They are so easy to navigate, example-rich, and grokable. The best part is that they are fully open-source, so anyone can contribute! 🎉 Check out openapi.info for the best OpenAPI docs out there #openapi #documentation #swagger #api

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There's no such thing as a free lunch. Open source Kafka is "free" to download, but not free. Confluent reduces TCO drastically. TCO Blog Series, Parts 1-4: https://lnkd.in/eNyAHrEX

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What if end to end tests weren't brittle and didn't take forever to run? And they weren't often maintained by a separate group that operates somewhat off cycle from the development team? Wouldn't that be better than maintaining unit tests that often are too tightly coupled to implementation details? Not trying to ignore integration tests here, as they are a middle ground. But I want to focus on the confidence we get from our tests. Which, in my opinion, is an exact inversion of the typical 'test pyramid'. End to end tests giving us the most confidence, and unit tests giving us the least. You have to ignore all the problems with end to end test implementation to agree on this point, but I still think it stands. So if we agree end to end tests provide the most confidence, how can we fix the problems with implementation? And are they worth fixing?

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Corporate IT has no place on the path to production. I see LOTS of portcos that hold onto shortcuts they took when they were small. Corp IT runs Jira, or email goes out through the corporate mail gateway. Call it technical debt if you like, and taking on technical debt makes sense when you're a startup. But when you've made it past that stage, it's time to pay it down. Corporate IT is incredibly valuable. I was the Director of IT before I decided to dedicate my career to production web operations. I knew my CDW rep very well. Corporate IT can handle: corporate email, Salesforce, Tableau, calendaring, Zoom, Dropbox, etc. Corporate IT cannot handle: production SMTP gateways, Jira, Confluence, GitLab, Launch Darkly, Datadog, Cloudbees, etc. I don't care in the slightest which actual vendors you use for these functions. I've seen corporate IT change SCMs to "save money" without any input from engineering and set the entire organization release schedules back by more than 8 months because it turns out that GitHub "runners" have security concerns. People have made changes to corporate email and suddenly customers no longer receive notifications, and no one in engineering knows why. Engineering (including Operations) is where the money is made in a software company, and they need to own the path to production. Think of it in terms of "chain of custody" considering the concern over supply chain attacks. In the chain of custody, we don't just let someone with completely different concerns handle evidence. Why would you? #devops #sre #engineering

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I'm biased, because I'm a nerd, but I love it when product owners spin up a technical tool such as Postman and hit an API endpoint, like I saw on a recent sprint review for one of Ascendle's development clients. I think about the "user interface" being any surface area that can be consumed by a human OR a machine. The graphical user interface is what product owners deal with most of the time, but many products also include another user interface: an API that can be consumed from an external system. From what I've seen, product owners who embrace the idea of learning more about how APIs work (with the help of the team) become more powerful in their role because they can understand how all users of the system will consume it. Do product owners *have to* learn how to use something like Postman? Absolutely not. There's nothing wrong with a developer on the team jumping in for the technical parts of a sprint review. But for those product owners who are technically inclined or curious, it may be empowering to know how things work under the covers.

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I've been thinking about the challenge of preserving the "low priority voice" as software products scale. As teams and projects grow, folks outside of development and product positions seem to get more and more quiet—or maybe they're just harder to hear. Sure, a typo here, some inconsistent spelling there; these don't really rise to the level of "bugs" since nothing's technically broken. But when these little things accumulate, they can start to chip away at the users' trust in the product and the company. Curious to know, how are others tackling this within their teams? #SoftwareDevelopment #TeamCollaboration #QualityAssurance

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The term “Developer Ecosystem” has been rolling around in my brain lately, so let’s discuss. Here’s the problem I’m noticing. The term #developerexperience is experiencing a similar problem to the term #technicaldebt. It correctly explains the problem for folks who have experience working in software and organizational systems that are inefficient and ineffective. The struggle of just getting good work out the door is real, and we know how we could make things better. We get it, so using these terms feels good because we finally have a phrase that describes a more abstract concept that we feel is important. But the value we feel in using these terms in our familiar domain doesn’t quite translate to people who don’t have experience working as or with software developers. The meaning gets lost in translation and the people who have the most influence into what organizational initiatives get funded can’t conceptualize the benefit. As I’m observing the trends in the #devex movement, I’m seeing that metrics like DORA, SPACE and the DevEx Model are highly focused on an *integrated* experience, not an *individual* experience. It’s about ensuring developers are working in concert with the organizational system instead of fighting it. The struggle is often strong and significant, but it’s easy to think it’s trivial if you haven’t been there. This nuance is pretty hidden, so it’s understandable when it gets glossed over or misinterpreted. I think this is why folks in other domains think about DevEx as emphasizing the productivity of individuals or assuming that devs want to be pampered and treated better than their colleagues. I’m curious if framing the overall problem as ecosystem health would help influence change. Would CEOs and CFOs grasp and fund initiatives more? My hunch is yes after so many years of selling the value of modernizing legacy systems, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

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Today I saw someone in a Slack community ask, How do I keep my enablement materials up-to-date when I work for an agile SaaS company that rolls out updates every two weeks? I see this question a lot in various forms. "Our company just changed the entire UI of our product - any tips or tools I can use to update all our screenshots?" "Any AI tools for building videos or simulations that can update them automatically when the product changes?" Here's my answer: stop using video demos, screenshots, and simulations. Don't have anything in video or image format that shows the product. (Which, admittedly, may not be very helpful to someone staring down a massive content update, so that's why I'm posting here instead of answering them directly!) But Rowan, I hear you cry, how will people experience the look and feel of the product? Through hands-on labs. Getting up and running with a hands-on lab platform may be a bigger initial investment in time and expertise than cranking out videos, simulations, and screenshots. But it pays off down the line when product updates are happening. In modern lab platforms, like Skillable, the lab instructions are written in text (in Skillable's case, markdown). That means that when the UI changes, it's a relatively quick fix to go in and edit the instructions. You can even use a versioning system, such as git, to manage your lab instructions, with all the great things that come with that - search capabilities, rollbacks, keeping multiple versions of the same instructions for different product versions, and so on. To sum up: Videos and graphics are for concepts. Hands-on labs are for UI and procedures.

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Do you think you need to hire developers as w2 employees to build a highly-skilled, devoted and culturally aligned team? Let Blueprint show you otherwise. Here's how we're changing the game: 1️⃣ Unmatched Quality: Quality is our creed. Our vetting process includes interviewing with former CTOs and senior software engineers, ensuring only top-tier talent makes it to your team. 2️⃣ Long-Term Commitment: Forget the turnover and churn worries! Our developers stay longer than industry norms for W2 developers (average tenure of 2.2 years), providing stability and continued expertise to your projects. 3️⃣ Cultural Integration: Culture isn't just an add-on for us. We dive deep to understand your core values and ensure every developer we match with your team enhances and embraces your company culture. 4️⃣ Equity is Optional: Save your cap table for your growing startup! We ensure that our developers are passionate believers in your product right from the start - without incentivizing them with equity. We rigorously test for craftsmanship, ensuring they value not just a quality end result but also the journey of creation. 🌟 Shoot us a DM to connect and see how we can improve your staffing strategy. #StaffAugmentation #InnovationInStaffing #TechTalent #CultureFit #LongTermGrowth

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👾 Errors, those fun little gremlins that love to pop up at the worst times and toss a 🔧 into whatever grand schemes you have planned. With SDK hooks you can hook directly into the error flow of your Speakeasy SDK and export those errors, and relevant context, directly into a service like Sentry. You can get ahead of issues your customers face and act on them long before a support case hits your queue. Here's to a better developer experience, one feature at a time. #SDKs #openapi #hooks #errors #logs #telemetry

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From all the nerds (like me) to everyone trying to figure out how to deal with us, here's a tip: please don't treat asynchronous communication the same way you would a live conversation. Give me all the information upfront so I can respond with what you need when I have a moment. If I get a "Hello Nick" in Slack... I might just ignore you until you give me the full context. I will definitely ignore you if I'm in a flow state. There are two types of communication: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous Communication: This is your phone call, virtual meeting, or in-person chat (remember those?). It's like a tennis match when done right: listen, respond, listen, respond... Asynchronous Communication: This includes emails, direct messages, texts, etc. Think of it as a book: you can put it down and pick it up later. Or not at all. Platforms like Slack, Teams, and Google Chat are all about async communication. When done right, it's a fantastic way to collaborate. Make the most of it by being clear, concise, and most importantly, complete in sending messages.

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