Grill your weaknesses, be an ultra-learner
Ref:
Ultra-learning, Scott H. Young
Software Engineer Skills
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Coding Skills: Latter solution is better than
previous solution.
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System Design: Design high-level solution +
verified each requirement and enhanced questions and facts (metrics,
current system).
How to Deal with Uncertain Problems
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Telemetry First: Identify service dependencies and
understand how services interact.
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Explore Service Endpoints: Examine the HTTP and
gRPC endpoints exposed by each service.
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High-Level Thinking (Intuitive Curiosity):
Understand the overall architecture and product vision from Figma
designs and system design documents.
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Explore the Flow: Trace the end-to-end request flow
and identify the core functions within the codebase.
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Testing: Run the application and test API endpoints
to verify inputs, outputs, and expected behavior.
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Coding: Optimize the implementation and perform
thorough code reviews.
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Monitoring: Add meaningful metrics, logs, and
alerts to observe the health and performance of the feature.
Grill weaknesses
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Meta thinking first: Draw high-level idea map
before doing anything.
- Structured Thinking: Order the actions.
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Implementation Skills: Understand full flow, not
only tickets.
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Retain long-term knowledge: store facts, feedback,
concepts, active retrieve it in long-term knowledge base.
-
Present for impact (teach, convince, motivate):
stimulate to explain your thinking for other people follow Feynman
Technique, 3-sentences rules for other needs, use body language and
focus to main point to grab user attention.
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Improve quality of outreach, connections: enhance
outreach to open communicate with strangers, value connections, and
make service for community.
Principles
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Fact is what happening.
Proposal comes with trade-offs and reasons.
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Needs are about survival.
Wants are about desires.
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How to learn new thing: See it
(mostly 70%). Do it (for high-execution required
skills). Feedback it (be corrective feedback with
insights)
My expectations 2026
