📜 Effective Engineer Book Review

After a long break from my last company because of COVID-19 Pandemic impacts and needs to stay sane, I decided to write this book review. To be honest, I am a person that rarely reads a book. Effective Engineer is the first non-academic-related book that I read as my willingness. So I think this review is not really well written because this is also the first blog that I wrote as my will and not because of the assignment from college. 😂

The Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau This book will tell us how to improve our ways to be more effective when we developing software products. There are a lot of tasks we do when we developing software, write tech documentation, create functions/features, adding the test, design and build the infrastructure, and many things that will make our program have high-quality software.

To make our work more efficient, we should reduce unnecessary things and make repetitive work that can be done in a single action item. For example:

We should make our deployment easier by using CI/CD We should set up our codebase that can be run in a single command by creating shell scripting if we work on it every day We should make our hiring process for new joiners easier by creating an internal framework in the company We should help our new joiners easier to adapt to our company by the mentorship program We should create an automated test to make us not doing it every time we make a change We should create technical docs to make other contributors easier to adapt with the codebase Because time investment is very important as a software engineer (maybe for all kinds of jobs). We can do another thing by obtaining more time to create another helpful idea, innovation, simplify another repetitive work, of course, to make our product have a high quality.

This book also tells us how to prioritize our work from high leverage to low leverage group. Leverage is a measurement of “Impact Produced divided by Time Invested”. So if we have a task that very impactful but we just need little time to do it, it will have a high leverage task. But if we have a task (for example) that only need to change button color but it takes more than a day, let’s refactor the codebase from zero, kidding bro 😂.

I have also been given a number of case examples from the author’s experience in previous and current companies. It will be more related and interesting to me as a software engineer in the company. I think if I still a student, this book will not really relatable with me, because there are some example that we can only do in the company, for example, code refactoring for huge and many authors work on it, handle the infrastructure that serves a million users, collaboration with more people that will need us to write technical documentation (I think we rarely do this in the college except for thesis and paper 🤷‍♂️), but I still recommend this book for every software engineer and computer scientist hehe.

If I can tell in one sentence what is inside this book, this book asks us to make our work not repeatable, the program is easy to maintain, scalable, and we just need fewer action to do a lot of things (autonomous).

That’s it! Please give me another book recommendation (anything, not only about tech), and InshaAllah I will make another review because this is very satisfying for the first book review hahaha. I hope you guys stay healthy and not get a negative impact from this Covid-19 Pandemic, see you!

Source:

https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-Disproportionate-Meaningful/dp/0996128107