Software Engineering Practices Topics
Covers industry-standard practices for building maintainable, high-quality software, including code quality, maintainability, documentation, and effective technical communication within engineering teams.
Technical Communication and Mentoring
Focuses on explaining technical solutions clearly and using interactions as coaching opportunities. Topics include structuring explanations for different audiences, guiding engineers through problem solving, using code and design reviews as mentoring tools, giving constructive and actionable feedback while preserving psychological safety, and communicating technical tradeoffs to product and business stakeholders. Emphasis is on clarity, pedagogy, listening, and techniques to help junior engineers grow.
Code Quality and Communication
Skills and practices for producing readable, maintainable, and idiomatic code while clearly communicating intent. Candidates should demonstrate clear naming, logical structure, proper error handling, and writing code that other engineers can easily review and extend. This topic also covers narrating your thought process while coding, explaining trade offs between readability and optimization, identifying next optimization steps, and knowing when to avoid premature optimization. Interviewers will assess both the code you produce and your ability to explain design choices and sequencing of improvements.
Iterative Problem Solving and Feedback
Evaluates how a candidate breaks larger algorithmic or implementation tasks into small, testable steps and incorporates feedback while coding. Candidates should describe an incremental implementation strategy, running tests or examples after each logical section, validating intermediate outputs, and progressively improving or refactoring code when new requirements or feedback arrive. Interviewers look for evidence of test driven thinking, modularization, risk aware trade offs between quick iteration and correctness, clear communication of intermediate assumptions, and a collaborative attitude toward feedback.
Production Grade Code
Focuses on writing code that is safe, maintainable, and operable in production environments. Topics include defensive programming, robust error handling and retry strategies, idempotency, resource management, structured logging and metrics for observability, health checks and graceful degradation, testability with unit and integration tests, performance and memory considerations, dependency management and versioning, feature flag strategies and safe deployment patterns, and processes for validating and rolling back changes in production. Emphasis is on choices that reduce operational burden and support long term maintainability.
Production Quality Code Organization
Practices for organizing code so it is maintainable, observable, and testable in production. Topics include module and package layout, separation of concerns, defensive error handling, structured logging, metrics instrumentation, abstractions for infrastructure dependencies, ensuring testability with dependency injection or inversion of control, and strategies for incremental rollout and safe releases. Candidates should be able to articulate patterns that make code easy to operate and troubleshoot in live environments.