I asked on Twitter today something I’d been talking to at lot of friends about – how does someone become a senior developer? How do I know what I should be practicing? What qualities should I be looking for in mentors?

The best answer I got was this blog post: On Being a Senior Engineer, by John Allspaw at Etsy. I am mostly writing this so I can remember go back and read that repeatedly. It talks about

• taking and seeking out criticism and
• non-technical skills and
• estimates (eeep! so hard!) and
• doing tedious and boring work and
• raising up the people around you (“generosity of spirit”) and
• making tradeoffs explicit when making judgements and
• empathy and
• cognitive bias and
• so much more

But you should just go read it.

I’ve also been thinking about this tweet by @seriouspony:

Myth: to get better at x, just do a lot more of it (writing/skating/coding, etc.) What/how you "do" X matters far more than how much/often.

— Seriouspony (@seriouspony) November 25, 2013

and how it’s easy to get stuck in a rut and keep doing the things you’re comfortable with. I’d like to not do that.

A few other things people linked me to that were interesting:

• Engineering Management by Yishan Wong
• Kate Matsudaira on leadership
• This programmer competency matrix has some good categories for purely technical skills
• A repository of job titles by Urban Airship
• a software engineer title ladder
• Joel Spolsky on compensation and titles