💼what my first engineering role taught me

not a resume entry. the stuff i actually carry with me from my time as a working engineer — what i'd tell a younger version of myself on the first monday.

the code is the easy part

i spent my first three months thinking the hard part was writing good code. it wasn't. the hard part was figuring out which code was worth writing. the seniors didn't type faster than me. they just typed the right things.

ask embarrassingly early

every hour i spent stuck in silence was a gift to my ego and a theft from the team. asking "i'm stuck, can you look for five minutes?" at hour two saves the eight hours i'd have spent proving i didn't need help.

write things down

every weird bug, every tribal fact, every "we do it like this because of that incident in q3." future-you, and future-teammate, will find it at 2am and love you for it.

the best seniors don't act senior

they explain things twice without sighing. they write the unglamorous docs. they say "i don't know" in front of the whole team. that's who i'm trying to become.