dansackett / engineering-questions

A repository to hold questions to help me write better code from start to finish

Engineering Questions

When working in the software engineering field there are so many questions that you can ask up front to save time down the line when scoping out a new project. There are also so many things to consider before shipping a product. Some of these that I have run into are captured here as a checklist to remind myself where my questions should be taking me.

Questions about Edge Cases

• What's the empty state?
• What happens if there's only one?
• What happens when there are a thousand?
• What if times are in the distant future / past
• What happens if there are weird timezones?
• What happens when the request fails?
• What happens when the request is loading?
• What happens if the string is very long?
• Are there accesibility implications?
• How does it look on mobile? In landscape view?
• What happens when the user is logged out?
• When handling events, Can the events arrive in a different order? What if we never receive this event? What if this event happens twice in a row?
• When writing if / else statements, does else catch more than it should? Have you thought about things that could slip through that shouldn't?

Questions about Solutions

• Is there anything else like this in the product?
• Can I pull data to support a particular solution?
• Can I make a skeleton solution before working with a designer?
• Is there anything like this in other products?
• What would be the most consistent with the spirit of the rest of this page / product?

Questions about Errors

• Do you handle errors gracefully? At all?
• Do you know why an error is occuring?
• Do you have error logging setup?
• Do you write regression tests to ensure errors do not return?

Questions about Refactoring

• Is this function doing too much?
• Is this import being used anywhere else?
• Can these pieces be moved into a clearer module?
• Are you doing too much type checking?
• Are you doing too many conditional checks?
• Does this function make sense? Signature?
• Can the state of this class be shared among subclasses?
• Is the code orthogonal such that changing it will not change other parts of the system?

Questions about using Dependencies

• How large is the dependency tree for your project?
• Does the third-party dependency you're considering have dependencies?
• Is the external API documented?
• Are you using the internal API? What if it changes?
• Are you using many features of the dependency or only a subset? Does it make sense to write the subset yourself?
• Are your dependencies easy to install for contributors to your project?

Questions about Databases

• Do most of your queries run without JOINs?
• Could you benefit from denormalizing a column on a table?
• Do you have a way of discovering slow queries?

Questions about Performance

• How large is the generated bundle of code? (mostly modern JS appropriate)
• Does an expensive task need to be run in realtime? Can it be asynchronous?
• Do you user ALL of the data from a request or can you limit the fields?