Engineering Career Presentation to UW Computer Science Undergrads

In January I had the honor to present a quick overview of my career to the UW Computer Science undergraduates. It was great to see the upcoming UW engineers, you could just sense that there is a lot of talent and curiosity in the room. I hope that they took note of a thing or two from my way and build on that.

Here is a copy of the slides for your pleasure:

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SDET / QA Engineer Interview Checklist

After interviewing and hiring hundreds of engineers over the past 12+ years I have come up with a few checklists. I wanted to share one of those with you so you could conduct comprehensive interviews of QA Engineers for your team.

I use this checklist when I review incoming resumes and during the interview. It keeps me from missing areas that ensure a good team and technology fit. I hope you make good use of them. If you think there are good questions or topics that I have missed - get in touch with me!

SDE/T or QA Engineer interview checklist from Mike Borozdin
If you like this checklist you might want to check out these posts:
Emotional Intelligence in Software Teams and Good-bye manual tester, hello crowdsourcing!

Code versus Configuration

At Ethos we are building a distributed mortgage origination system and in mortgage there is a lot of
different user types with processes that vary depending on geography. One of our ongoing discussions is about how much of the logic resides in code vs. being in a workflow system or configuration. After researching this topic for a bit, I have arrived at a conclusion that the logic should live outside of code very infrequently, which might come as a surprise to a lot of enterprise software engineers.

Costs of configuration files and workflow engines First thing that I assume is true is that having any logic outside of the code has costs associated with it. Debugging highly configurable system involves not only getting the appropriate branch from source control, you also need to make sure that the right configuration values or the database. In most cases this is harder for programmers to deal with. In many FinTech companies where the production data is not made readily accessible…

Should this be a microservice?

After having developed several distributed systems and been a part of dozens of architectural discussions I decided to put together a way to frame the microservices debate. Microservices have been fashionable for some time. A lot of it stemmed from the fact that big and successful cloud companies are using microservices. It seems reasonable that to create a “serious system” one must be using serious tools and architecture, today it’s microservices. No engineer wants to be called out for creating a solution that “doesn’t scale.”

The definition for a microservice varies, but overall it tends to be a piece of your system that can run somewhat independently (unless of course it depends on other microservices) and has a REST or queue processing interface. Overall code encapsulation and separation of concerns have all been around for a long period of time. Current evolution with containers, fast networks and REST API allows people to easily integrate pieces of their system using web se…

Software + Management // by Mike Borozdin

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