You come into your new job ready to solve hard problems, to write elegant code, and to ply your craft. Exciting! Congratulations! We hope
you get to tackle interesting challenges; work with wonderful, intelligent,
and passionate colleagues; and build useful things.
But you will soon discover, or perhaps have already discovered, that
knowing how to program—how to use computers to solve problems—is
only half the battle. It’s a critical part of your skillset, yet to be an effective
software engineer, you need other skills that are not taught in school. The
Missing README will teach you these skills.
We will explain modern practices for building, testing, and running
production software, and describe behaviors and approaches that make
for stronger teams and better teammates. We’ll give you practical advice
on how to get help, write design documents, work on old code, be on-call,
plan your work, and interact with your manager and team.