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.
Testing Your Own Code
Ability to validate and reason about their own implementation before and after committing code. Candidates should demonstrate how they identify edge cases and invalid inputs, mentally run through test cases, write small unit tests, use assertions and invariants, reason about concurrency and error handling, use debuggers and static analysis tools, and refactor code to improve testability. Include practices such as quick local smoke tests, simple regression checks, and using code review feedback to uncover missed scenarios.
Debugging and Error Handling
Demonstrate practical approaches for finding and fixing defects and for writing resilient code. Topics include reproducing failures, reading and interpreting stack traces and logs, using breakpoints and step debugging, narrowing root cause through isolation and binary search, improving observability via structured logging and instrumentation, writing defensive code and clear error handling, using assertions and retries judiciously, and converting production incidents into reproducible test cases. Candidates should also explain strategies for diagnosing race conditions, intermittent failures, and how they prevent recurrence through tests and monitoring.