Codeshal

The more time I spend evaluating engineers (or anything really), the more I come back to three core things: execution, initiative, and personality.

Execution. The people we all respect the most get a lot done quickly. And that work is of high quality - builds on a strong knowledge base, well documented, thought out, performant, correct, not overwrought.

Initiative. Seniority is really marked by an engineer constantly learning about technology and the company, looking at the company’s goals, identifying high-impact things on their own, and coming up with a plan to build them, all with little supervision.

Personality. To be really effective, a good engineer has the personality to persuade, discuss, and mentor, as well as collaborate and be open-minded.

Does this miss anything? I’ve already found this framework pretty useful, and usually when somebody seems almost-but-not-quite ready to be a leader, it’s easy to spot one of three that needs some more work.

If you’re trying to Wireshark to observe SSL traffic (for example, to see if connections are being reused and SSL sessions being resumed), you’ll find yourself needing to filter by ip.addr = XXXX. Unfortunately, Amazon Route 53 appears to pretty aggressively vend different IP addresses every time you ask, which means you’ll want to pick one and throw it in your /etc/hosts so that you can know what your client is using as an IP.

If your client happens to be an Android emulator, though, you might be in for a rude surprise. It seems (?) like it ignores you local /etc/hosts file. Instead, I had to change the /etc/hosts in the emulator itself. I ended up following some great instructions from Brad Curtis. Be sure to pay attention to step 1! Otherwise you’re in for a head scratcher. In Eclipse, you can enter that parameter in Run > Run Configurations > Target > Additional Emulator Command Line Options. And if you’re on a Mac, you’ll probably find adb in ./android-sdks/platform-tools