Stripe

When I decided to try to write a book, the only certainty I had was that I was not an expert on a lot of topics I wanted to write about. So I knew that to make sure I was writing a book that was correct regarding the industry standard I would need to study… a lot.

For instance, I have a whole chapter dedicated on software developers: expectations for each phase of the career, the myth of the superhero developer and the “soft” vs “hard” skills. Although I am a software engineer for many years now, that doesn’t mean my experience is universal. If I wanted to write something that was —more or less— universal, I needed to make sure to learn about many points of view.

Many many moons ago, I wrote a blog post about what was like in my first 6 months at Stripe. Since then, a lot has happened including a whole pandemic and me spending every free hour writing my own book. Because of that and many more things, I never got to write a second piece to what I was initially hoping to be a once-a-year kind of blog post.

Being a software engineer at a new company—anywhere—is hard. The codebase is completely new, you have to adapt to new patterns (for both code and culture) and most likely the problem space is completely new to you too.