Member-only story

5 daily habits of senior engineers

Bennett Garner
Developer Purpose
Published in
4 min readJul 29, 2022

I wish I’d known about these techniques earlier.

Deliver them consistently, and you’ll get noticed on your team. They’re the foundation of creating real value as a software developer.

Senior engineer routines

Top senior engineers are a strange bunch.

  • Food YouTube is always on in the background when my colleague is coding.
  • 14 windows, hundreds of tabs, and Run the Jewels blasting in the headphones. That’s the workflow of my former CTO.
  • I know a senior developer who needs a clean desk, staring at a wall, with noise canceling headphones in order to focus.

Working as a senior engineer can take all kinds of forms. They all look different and match the personality of the developer.

I don’t think you should listen to Run the Jewels, stare at a blank wall, or watch YouTube in the background in order to be a great developer.

But all of these senior engineers do have a few things in common…

1. Notetaking

All of the top engineers I know have some system for notetaking.

I’ve seen them use fancy tools like Notion. I’ve also seen simple text files. Doesn’t matter. Great engineers take notes.

--

--

Published in Developer Purpose

DeveloperPurpose.com — Free email course on building meaning and purpose in your software career. My goal is to help you get get a job working on software that makes the world a better place.

Written by Bennett Garner

DeveloperPurpose.com — Build a coding career with meaning and purpose 💻 Top writer in technology ✍️

Responses (4)