Backbone in software engineer

Here is backbone in multiple perspectives of becoming a software engineer.

1. Product-minded Engineer

  • Usecase first.

  • Metrics for product, system: grafana, opentemetry

  • Design for failure, consistency, scalability (partitioning, replicas) based on current infrastructure + metric facts.

  • UI/UX: user personal flow, symapathy map (see/hear, think/feel, say/do), event tracking (mixpanel, google analytics)

2. Software Operation Mindset

  • backstage.io

  • incident.io.

  • Alert, on-call responsibility, runbook.

  • Data in Grafana, opentemetry.

3. Platform Engineer

  • Istio

  • Temporal

  • Elastic Search

  • Flink/Spark

  • DRE: Percuna, MySQL, Redis, Kafka.

4. SRE

  • Cluster: Terraform, CI/CD, K8S.

  • Cloud: AWS, Load Balancing, API Gateway.

5. Tech Lead

  • Code Review

  • Value Feedback, prevent Nitpick

  • Delegate tasks with Acceptance Criteria.

  • Pair Programming & Knowledge Sharing

  • 1-1 Meeting Feedback.

  • Architect Decision: Trade-offs but not Right/Wrong.

    • Technical Decision Making: Problem, Trade-offs, Time + Budget + Resource.

    • Architecture Decision Records (ADR)

    • Technical Debt

    • Trade-offs

  • Communication

    • Writing Docs.

    • Stakeholder Communication: PM, dev, QA.

    • Diversity Cuture: Japanese, Korean, USA.

    • Conflict Resolution.

6. Engineer Manager

  • Visionary: Strategy.

  • Motivated: motivate team, stakeholder.

  • Manage outcome: project, team delivery.

June 7, 2026