Learn from a Longtime Software Engineer

Andy S.

I'm a software engineer with over 40 years of industry experience and a BS and MS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I've worked on both applications and operating system kernels, in cloud, on-premise, and embedded environments.

Throughout my career I've mentored junior engineers, mostly through code reviews and design discussions. I explain why something won't work or why another approach would be better, and I answer whatever questions come up. When an idea of theirs isn't clear, I ask how they arrived at it or how they expect it to work. I'll point out a problem and sometimes suggest a direction, but I leave the actual work to them.

The topics that come up again and again are performance, writing clean code that others (and you yourself) can understand, making sure code meets requirements, and test coverage. For example, a junior engineer I worked with wrote code to check whether points in 2D space were within a certain distance of each other, using the power and square root library functions. I pointed out that the power function is expensive and had him read its implementation to see why, so he switched to multiplying each value by itself. Then I suggested that we could eliminate the square root, also an expensive function, by comparing the squared distance to the square of the limit. The lesson there is that a library call may not be a cheap operation. Often that doesn't matter, but in performance-critical code you need to know what a function is doing, or at least how expensive it is.

Send me a message describing what you're working on and where you're stuck. In our first session, we'll look at your code or assignment and figure out how to get you moving again.