Weekly Lesson as a Software Engineer
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If you are about to ask your teammate something small and quick, like “Does ALTER TABLE works with a VIEW (postgres)?”, MAYBEEE just stop there a bit and do some homework.
You can try to search the entire codebase to see how others did it at other places, read one or two pages of the Documentation (yeah, there’s such a thing guys 😂), read the README.md, etc. That’s just some examples but in summary, for googlable questions, I’d try to spend 5-15 mins to look for a solution myself.
I know you want to get it done, I know you may have been stuck in that task for 2 days already, but take a deep breath and see if there’s anything you can do first.
And if you do ask your teammate, follow up with a question like “Do we have it documented somewhere?”. This is something I learned from working in the Student Support Call Centre — Empowering customers. The point is that if you know where to look for the information, you will be less likely to need help from others next time.
And you should also take into consideration how busy (and stressful) your team is and decide if you want to reach out for help or sit back and strive a bit more.
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That’s it for this week 🙂
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