Software Engineering Practices Topics
Covers industry-standard practices for building maintainable, high-quality software, including code quality, maintainability, documentation, and effective technical communication within engineering teams.
Code Quality and Communication
Skills and practices for producing readable, maintainable, and idiomatic code while clearly communicating intent. Candidates should demonstrate clear naming, logical structure, proper error handling, and writing code that other engineers can easily review and extend. This topic also covers narrating your thought process while coding, explaining trade offs between readability and optimization, identifying next optimization steps, and knowing when to avoid premature optimization. Interviewers will assess both the code you produce and your ability to explain design choices and sequencing of improvements.
Production Grade Code
Focuses on writing code that is safe, maintainable, and operable in production environments. Topics include defensive programming, robust error handling and retry strategies, idempotency, resource management, structured logging and metrics for observability, health checks and graceful degradation, testability with unit and integration tests, performance and memory considerations, dependency management and versioning, feature flag strategies and safe deployment patterns, and processes for validating and rolling back changes in production. Emphasis is on choices that reduce operational burden and support long term maintainability.