Key concepts and best practices for new software engineers -- stuff critical to your workplace success that you weren't taught in school.

For new software engineers, knowing how to programme is only half the battle. You'll quickly find that many of the skills and processes key to your success are not taught in any school or bootcamp. The Missing README fills in that gap--a distillation of workplace lessons, best practices, and engineering fundamentals that the authors have taught rookie developers at top companies for more than a decade.

Early chapters explain what to expect when you begin your career at a company. The book's middle section expands your technical education, teaching you how to work with existing codebases, address and prevent technical debt, write production-grade software, manage dependencies, test effectively, do code reviews, safely deploy software, design evolvable architectures, and handle incidents when you're on-call. Additional chapters cover planning and interpersonal skills such as Agile planning, working effectively with your manager, and growing to senior levels and beyond.

You'll learn:

- How to use the legacy code change algorithm, and leave code cleaner than you found it

- How to write operable code with logging, metrics, configuration, and defensive programming

- How to write deterministic tests, submit code reviews, and give feedback on other people's code

- The technical design process, including experiments, problem definition, documentation, and collaboration

- What to do when you are on-call, and how to navigate production incidents

- Architectural techniques that make code change easier

- Agile development practices like sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives

This is the book your tech lead wishes every new engineer would read before they start. By the end, you'll know what it takes to transition into the workplace-from CS classes or bootcamps to professional software engineering.

Table of Contents

1 The Journey Ahead

2 Getting to Conscious Competence

3 Working with Code

4 Writing Operable Code

5 Managing Dependencies

6 Testing

7 Code Reviews

8 Delivering Software

9 Going On-Call

10 Technical Design Process

11 Creating Evolvable Architectures

12 Agile Planning

13 Working with Managers

14 Navigating Your Career

Review

"This is an impressively thorough overview of the many skills a new software engineer will need to learn, beyond coding, to be successful in the job. A great book for new college grads and those just entering the profession who want to see what the next phase of their career curriculum will be."

--Camille Fournier, former Vice President of Technology at Goldman Sachs and author of The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

"The Missing README is exactly the book I wish I had when I started my career. Fun to read, full of sage advice and priceless stories. It is like having coffee with a senior mentor, except you don't even need to come up with the right questions. Very useful for engineers early in their career, and senior engineers who wonder what they missed."

--Gwen Shapira, Engineering Leader at Confluent

"The Missing README is an excellent practical introduction to the day-to-day realities of software engineering in the 21st century. It covers the wide range of essential skills, techniques and heuristics that you'll need to be an effective part of any team that builds, deploys and operates production systems.

" --Adewale Oshineye, Developer Advocate at Google and co-author of Apprenticeship Patterns

About the Authors

Chris Riccomini is a software engineer, startup investor, and advisor with more than a decade of experience at major tech companies such as PayPal, LinkedIn, and WePay. He has been involved in open source throughout his career and is the author of Apache Samza.

Dmitriy Ryaboy is a software engineer and engineering manager. He's worked at a variety of companies and organizations, including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Cloudera, and Twitter. He helped create and grow multiple open-source projects, including Apache Parquet. Dmitriy is currently the Vice President of software engineering at Zymergen.