The reason this is a survival guide is because after spending my entire career as a software engineer, I was thrown into a team lead role without much warning. I had no idea what I was doing and had very little support. This is the survival guide I wish I had. It documents my experiences as an inexperienced team lead –as an engineer transitioning to a team lead– and my learnings & mistakes along the way. Hopefully this can act as a survival guide for you, too. 

Can designing and building an application be as simple and as intuitive as the layout of your house?

Code reviews are a popular method of catching bugs early in development through peer-reviewing someone’s code. But perhaps more important than catching bugs, these reviews also serve as a chance to see how something is built and have a conversation about it. Because testers question software differently from developers, it’s important that we participate in this knowledge-sharing practice.

Are you building an API? Here is the idea: If you have never heard about the REST architectural style constraints and their implication on the properties of the resulting distributed system and you do not want to (or can’t) educate yourself, use GraphQL. 

How random is random? This is a weird question to ask, but it is one of paramount importance in cases where information security is concerned. Whenever you’re generating random data, strings, or numbers in Python, it’s a good idea to have at least a rough idea of how that data was generated.