DEV Community: Ahmet Sönmez

Here are some tips to help you become a better engineer.

Ahmet Sönmez — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 20:42:02 +0000

No matter what sector you work in, if you are an engineer, these humble suggestions will be useful to you.

You should learn the domain you are working on very well

No matter which sector you work in, you should not get stuck in the scope of your responsibility. Whether you are working in e-commerce, healthcare, automotive or even in a completely unique niche area, you need to know the entire process and dynamics of that sector well.

The most important advantage of this is that it will reveal the differences in your interpretation of future demands, in producing solutions and in your perspective on problems. Otherwise, you will only be evaluating all stages from your own small window.

Writing may be difficult but it is necessary!

It is vital to document all the stages you have just introduced into the process, planning or production. Adding this power to your life will have many advantages.

You will be able to quickly recall the changes and innovations made in the future, from the needs and demands that arose, to the reasons why such a decision was made at that moment. Also, you don’t want to have to explain all this work separately over and over again each time. This will work for everyone else but you. As an engineer, you will avoid the time cost and document it.

Every idea requires a demo!

If you have an idea and want to put it into practice, make sure you do a tangible and visible demo of it. This will make it easier for the people you tell about your idea to understand you better and give you feedback. It’s easy to dream, but you don’t produce that dream in the same way in everyone’s world.

The shortest and most practical way is a demo. In this demo, it will be much more effective, especially when you concretize the gains before and after with numbers. Clearly demonstrating the difference will play an important role in getting approval for your ideas. Just as every claim requires evidence, every idea requires a concrete work.

Keep everyone up to date!

Finalize the work you have started or taken over. The most important criterion at this stage is to inform stakeholders about interim updates. This could be your manager, teammates or customers. Keep them informed often without people asking you where they are with the latest status. This will increase trust in you. It will also save time and trust as the people who are responsible for you won’t need to follow up with you.

You must support!

You are not only responsible for your own team. If you are asked for support, do not turn it down, according to the possibilities and planning. Make the best use of these requests with effective methods in short periods of time, without disrupting your own work.

Keep in touch!

Good communication with all the stakeholders and teams you work with will improve both the quality of your work and the tolerance towards you in a positive way. After all, we work with people and even though we work professionally, we cannot ignore our emotions.

When we manage to communicate our human sides and emotions in good faith, we will see that many things are already solved more easily. This is not a relationship of interest, but rather an effort to do something without forgetting that we are only human. This will remind us of the idea of remaining human in every success or failure. We have less tolerance for people we don’t know and don’t converse with. However, when we do know people, we can guess how they think, what their mood is at that moment, and we can look at things from a broader perspective.

Interview Tips

Ahmet Sönmez — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 13:38:15 +0000

Apply for the right ads, push your limits!
We are trying to develop in a field we have chosen and we take care to apply for the appropriate postings. However, when we examine the postings, we see that too many competencies/requirements are requested. Some may even exaggerate and go beyond the relevant task. Here, the employer naturally wants to hire the best staff it can get.Of course, we try to find the best workplace.

If you think you meet more than 70% of the required features and the basic requirements, never hesitate to apply.
Because no posting will match your competencies exactly.

If you apply for jobs that are lower or equivalent to your qualifications, the further process may affect your career more negatively.

Choose the right interview time
Don’t be in a rush to attend the interview. Check your calendar.
Choose the most appropriate interview date by putting the option time to make up for your deficiencies, if any, until the interview.

Prepare well for interviews, everyone’s time is precious
Before participating in the interview, be sure to complete your preparations with the subject. Because, for both parties, there is one of the most precious things in our lives, time reserved for each other.
The interview you attend casually or unprepared will waste time for you and the other party. It will also cause unnecessary morale upset.

Choose the phrases that best describe yourself
Identify short and concise statements that will highlight your strengths.
Especially for that role, talking about your features that you think the other party will take into account will make you stand out.

Why did you choose this place or why me?
If you applied, make sure you have one or two solid arguments about why you are applying here. This will give the other party the feeling that you are really interested in the place and that you are doing research.

If you have received an offer, you can ask the same question this time. Find out why they brought you this offer.

If you don’t know, say you don’t know
Express that you don’t know clearly about the things you don’t know as well as you are clear about the things you know.This will help the other party to make more accurate decisions about you.

It will also change the form of the questions to come in the following chapters. This can be very embarrassing if it turns out you don’t know.

State your expectations clearly
An interview is like a mutual bargain. In the end, if both parties agree, the process proceeds. Therefore, express your expectations and wishes clearly. Don’t worry about what they’re thinking!

The other party lists their expectations while publishing the job posting.
You should convey your wishes and expectations to the other party so that there are no problems in the following processes.

Do not forget to thank you for this valuable meeting.

A different look at SDLC

Ahmet Sönmez — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 13:16:25 +0000

In this article, I do not want to waste your time by repeating the definition and explanations of SDLC, which has pages full of examples and definitions. Of course, I am not sure how successfully these will be applied in real life. These are purely well-intentioned engineering wishes.

There are only a few things I want to talk about.

Why each step in the SDLC process does not have a percentage value.
Why companies do not comply with this standard and all the documents presented remain so-called.

So far, I have reviewed many SDLC documents and been involved in the process. What particularly caught my attention was that no percentage values were assigned to the parts of the SDLC process. In other words, I believe that the analysis and planning process and the development, maintenance and testing processes have different costs, added value and structure.

For example, let’s assume that an SDLC process is a whole percentile. I think that 50% of this should definitely have the first 3 steps, namely the determination of needs, analysis/planning and the design sub-process. Because, the more time and effort is spent here, all the remaining processes will proceed in a more understandable and close to zero error manner.

After the desired demands are clarified and the necessary planning is made on them, 20% more will be sufficient for the development phase.

The subprocess I expect to have another 20% slice is testing/deployment. I think that a well planned and developed product will need a good test time at least as much as the development rate.

Finally, I think that a 10% surplus will suffice for the maintenance sub-process.

If you wish, you can use these steps in general product development or apply different methodologies to the sub-processes for each part at different rates.

Because developing a process in which the needs are clearly identified and analyzed and appropriately planned can turn out to be almost child’s play. Otherwise, after the product hits the market, it can become extremely costly or even impossible to change and develop many places.

Likewise, if you think your process will be technically advanced, you can manipulate these percentages by giving sincere values. The point is, what do you really value most and what exactly are you interested in in this process.

In general, the parts that I want to focus on are underestimated and the application development phase is started after almost a short analysis and planning. The reason for this haste may be sometimes the desire to reach the money early, sometimes the desire to get ahead of the competitors, and sometimes due to inexperience.

Of course, due to the problems experienced after skipping all these important steps, no one will hesitate to show many factors as the reason for the failure.

In Summary,

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

Benjamin Franklin

Some tips on being a great developer!

Ahmet Sönmez — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 13:10:54 +0000

You know, humans are social beings no matter what job they do. Sometimes and in some cases, work, family and social life balances can get mixed up.

Actually, I think the reason for the imbalance between all these roles is because people have different “values” in each role. In other words, while people have different values, thoughts and behaviors in their social life with their friends and relatives, they can have different values at work and in the family environment.

What should happen is that some values are fundamental and cannot be changed under any circumstances. First, I want to talk about “values” that don’t change. After completing these, you can become a “good person”, a “good manager” and a “good ….”.

Moral
By definition, morality is a set of rules of action, norms and value system created to regulate the behavior of people living in a community and their relations with each other.

Well, what comes to mind when you think of morality, what kind of image is formed? Of course, this subject has a separate philosophical part. I won’t go too deep. Plain and clear. First of all, what comes to our mind is probably to be fair, to be honest, not to lie under any circumstances, to be respectful to everyone and everything, including oneself, not to violate anyone’s rights, etc.

It’s actually very simple isn’t it? Well, if it’s that simple, why do 7 billion people have a hard time doing it? This could be the subject of a separate article.

If you believe that the values I have written above are moral values for you, please apply this not only to your family or to certain environments, but to everyone. Please remember that the only value that will make you human everywhere is morality.

Communication
I think we should take care to keep your communication the same with everyone, with the respect and kindness we show to our parents and our children.

One of people’s greatest strengths is being able to communicate. This can be verbal, written or physical. I’m not saying talk to everyone, be together. Just because I think it will add value to you and your environment, whether you have a job or not, we need to communicate in a sincere and respectful way.

You can be very good technically, you can be a super coder. But if your communication is bad, no one will want to work with you, maybe not at all.

I think that a good and quality communication can make the most difficult jobs and processes very easy. A quality communication brings with it trust and many values.

Collaboration
Whether you’re rewriting the application or implementing a new feature on an existing application, I think one of the most important things is to involve all stakeholders who will be affected or contribute to the change.

The purchasing department, QA, IT, accounting, project management etc. and most importantly the customer should be involved in the process and clearly articulate their needs, problems (possible and existing).

From a different perspective, do not hesitate to ask for support from the people you work with. From your subordinate or manager. This does not make you look weak, on the contrary, I think it increases the quality of you and the work you do. You can very quickly and permanently solve a problem that another friend has experienced before. You can get this experience very cheap. Even better, in the next step, your friends will not hesitate to ask you for help.

Preparation before pair programming
If you are going to pair with someone or someone, please set a time for it and prepare everything beforehand. If you need a test environment, have questions and whatever steps you have done before, prepare and convey them. You have no right to waste anyone’s time!

This will save you and your partner time. Another plus is that your future meeting requests will not be turned down.

Take a break
Yes, I think this is very difficult to do sometimes. I know that we spend hours thinking as if we can solve the problem at any moment. But taking that break is really hard, but it’s a great decision. After the break, all work can become more meaningful and easier. You must always do this for yourself.

Solve a problem
In fact, I think this is a skill that we should have in all areas of our lives. This ability will allow us to look at things differently, develop multiple thinking, and find shortcuts.

For this, my suggestion is to read books (books of people who don’t think like you) and to think about it a little bit. And of course, chatting with people we haven’t met before on different topics. Listening to them truly without prejudice.

This will increase our ability.

These are the ones that come to my mind for now, maybe I can continue the article as I think of it, or I can make new articles between the lines.

As for writing code, I never touched that part. Because, I think the above competencies, skills and values are much more important.