Move fast, break less

I received the first critical feedback of my career after my first promotion. Even though I was having more impact on my projects, my manager told me that I needed to change something or else we would have a serious problem.

Career growth for junior engineers comes from completing larger features. But, writing more code makes it easier to break things, which will slow your career growth. This article explains two ways to move fast without breaking anything.

I got my first promotion through sheer volume of work. I shipped larger features by averaging ~5 code changes a day. I could’ve gotten promoted with less output if I had discussed expectations for the next level with my manager (which I will address in a future post). But that wasn’t the main thing slowing my growth.

The main issue was that I sometimes broke things because I was making so many changes. My manager warned me this would become a serious problem if I didn’t change so I came up with ways to move fast without breaking anything. There are two main tactics which worked well for me:

1. Batching test plans - I spent a lot of time testing every code change I made. To make testing faster, I created large stacks of commits that were all loosely related on the same code path. I then ran tests covering the entire stack all at once. For a stack of 10 commits, I only paid the cost of testing once while making sure nothing broke.

2. Gating almost all changes - I began using [feature flags](optimizely.com/optimization-glossary/featur.. so that users couldn’t access code paths while I worked on them. That way I could land code as fast as I wanted without worrying about breaking anything. Then when I was ready to release the code, I would verify everything all at once by turning on the flag for a small population while monitoring it.

Look for ways to optimize your workflow to become more productive. In this case, I saved a ton of time on testing by batching and gating features. Code review is another major bottleneck that can slow you down as I discussed in this Twitter thread:

Now it’s your turn: aside from testing and code review, are there any other major bottlenecks in your workflow that slow you down? If you learned something helpful consider subscribing to my Substack for new posts every Friday.

Thanks for reading,
Ryan Peterman