Ask HN: Which habit/system makes you an effective engineer?

Some brief thoughts:<p>- have a great note taking system - personally I like anything which auto links to related notes, like a wiki. There&#x27;s obsidian, but I use vim notes as I like vim and need to keep internal stuff out of cloud.<p>- get involved in cross team initiatives - will help build domain knowledge and relationships<p>- for digging through codebases one thing I&#x27;d like to try and haven&#x27;t got round to is using a lightweight IDE just for hunting around and joining up the dots. Eg the main IDE I use is heavyweight with all the indexing it does. Sometimes I&#x27;d rather have a local &quot;monorepo&quot; with lightweight tooling which isn&#x27;t always indexing or spawning daemons.<p>On that last point, get your tooling to work for you exceptionally well. Any friction will add up over time and discourage quick experiments or exploration.<p>Hope it goes well!

I post this from time to time, incluing here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28422944" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28422944</a> with some editing. Recycling some replies. More context on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26182988" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26182988</a> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19924100" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19924100</a> (understanding codebases, etc.)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26591067" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26591067</a> (testing pipelines, scaffolding, issue templates)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22873103" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22873103</a> (making the most out of meetings, leveraging your presence)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22827841" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22827841</a> (product development)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20356222" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20356222</a> (giving a damn)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25008223" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25008223</a> (If I disappear, what will happen)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24972611" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24972611</a> (about consulting and clients, but you can abstract that as &quot;stakeholders&quot;, and understanding the problem your &quot;client&quot;, who can be your manager, has.)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24209518" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24209518</a> (on taking notes. When you&#x27;re told something, or receive a remark, make sure to make a note and learn from it whether it&#x27;s a mistake, or a colleague showing you something useful, or a task you must accomplish.. don&#x27;t be told things twice or worse. Be on the ball and reliable).<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24503365" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24503365</a> (product, architecture, and impact on the team)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22860716" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22860716</a> (onboarding new hires to a codebase, what if it were you, improve code)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22710623" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22710623</a> (being efficient learning from video, hacks. Subsequent reply: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22723586" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22723586</a>)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21598632" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21598632</a> (communication with the team, and subsequent reply: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21614372" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21614372</a>)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21427886" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21427886</a> (template for taking minutes of meetings to dispatch to the team. Notes are in GitHub&#x2F;GitLab so the team can access them, especially if they haven&#x27;t attended).<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24177646" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24177646</a> (communication, alignment)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21808439" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21808439</a> (useful things for the team and product that add leverage)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20323660" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20323660</a> (more meeting notes. Reply to a person who had trouble talking in corporate meetings)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22715971" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22715971</a> (management involvement as a spectrum)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25922120" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25922120</a> (researching topics)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26147502" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26147502</a> (keeping up with a firehose of information)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26123017" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26123017</a> (fractal communication: communication that can penetrate several layers of management and be relevant to people with different profiles and skillsets)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26179539" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26179539</a> (remote work, use existing tooling and build our own. Jitsi videos, record everything, give access to everyone so they can reference them and go back to them, meetings once a week or two weeks to align)<p>Write better. Always.