Learn to Dig as a Software Engineer
One of the most useful skills I learned as a software engineer
During another late night at the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, a colleague and I were working to integrate an open source developer tool with a legacy application we had. My colleague, a senior engineer and a life long proponent of open source technology, had considerably more enthusiasm than I at the hour. Eventually we got all of our environment variables set-up and hit the “Enter” key on the fateful terminal command that would test our tool. It didn’t work. The terminal regurgitated some obscure error that came deep from the confines of the open source tool.
“Welp it was a nice try”, I exclaimed accepting defeat. “What if we dig into the tool’s source code?”, my colleague offered. Dumbfounded, I mumbled out in agreement. What transpired next was a short adventure going through the tools GitHub repository attempting to identify the source of the error. When the problem wasn’t clear in the source code. We looked at the repositories reported issues. When the issues did not present an answer, we looked through the broken code the tool built. We kept digging.
Eventually, we root caused our problem. More importantly, than the solution was the skill I picked up on from my colleague during this exercise. As a software engineer it’s…
