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Things they didn't teach you about Software Engineering

vadimkravcenko.com · 6,243 words · saved by 1 readers

As always, a disclaimer before we start, this is purely subjective. Whether you are a seasoned professional or just starting out in the field, I hope these insights will provide valuable perspective. I've been thinking of writing this article since the middle of 2022 — but I couldn't remember all the things that should go here. So over the last year, I've been gathering ideas and writing them down, and now I have enough points that I'd like to share them with you. In university, they teach you how to write a 400-line program that solves a problem from A-Z. You have a blank canvas, and you need to show off your knowledge of some fancy algorithm to find a way to generate a maze. In the end, you have a nice solution to a straightforward problem. It sounds like the real world, right? But it's not. In the real world, you have a codebase of several hundred thousand lines, and you're trying to figure out what your colleagues were smoking when they wrote this marvelous piece. You go back and f

Things they didn't teach you about Software Engineering vadim kravcenko career development newsletter Things they didn’t teach you about Software Engineering 06 January 2023 · 127,946 views · Updated 04 April 2026 I’m jet-lagged, running on too much espresso, and decided to finally hit “publish” on the notes I’ve been stashing in my phone since last summer. These are the bits nobody bothered to warn me about when I started writing code for money. All subjective, all from the trenches — your mileage will almost certainly vary. I kept postponing this post because each we

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