Welcome to this edition of Ctrl+Alt+Deploy 🚀
I’m Lauro Müller and super happy to have you around 🙂 Let’s dive in right away!
In the previous article of this series, we made a huge leap: we went from writing code that was merely reliable to crafting tools your teammates could actually use, understand, and build upon. Your code is now clean, configurable, reusable, and even has a user manual attached. You should be proud (really!): you’re operating at a solid mid-level, building valuable assets for your team.
So, what's next? You’ve gotten good at the game, but now it’s time to start thinking about the stadium the game is being played in.
The journey to a senior level isn't about learning a fancier Python library or a more complex algorithm. It’s a fundamental shift in perspective. You stop just working in the system and start shaping the system itself. Your job is no longer just to write excellent code; it's to make decisions and build things that elevate the entire team. It’s about leverage.
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The Mindset Shift: From Individual Contributor to Force Multiplier
A mid-level engineer's primary focus is execution. They take a well-defined task and produce a high-quality, maintainable solution. Their goal is to be a productive, reliable member of the team. And that is incredibly valuable.
A senior engineer, on the other hand, is thinking on a different plane. Their primary goal isn't just their own productivity, but the productivity of everyone around them.
They hear a request like, "We need a script to deploy this new microservice," and their brain starts firing off a different set of questions:
"Wait, this is the third deployment script someone has asked for this quarter. What’s the common pattern here?"
"Instead of building another one-off script, could we build one tool that handles 80% of all our deployment needs?"
"What would a 'paved road' for deployments look like at this company, so a developer can get their service running in production safely without ever needing to ask us?"
A great mid-level engineer can take a complex ticket and absolutely nail the execution. They are an elite problem-solver. The senior engineer, on the other hand, looks at the last five tickets for deployment scripts and gets annoyed. Instead of just solving the next one, their first instinct is to ask, "Why are these so hard in the first place?" They focus on building the internal tool, the shared library, or the standardized pipeline that makes that entire class of tickets obsolete. It’s about looking up from the current task and fixing the system that generates the tasks.
With that in mind, let’s jump into a few skills extremely valuable to achieve that.