Michelle Bu - Arden's Codex

# about Payments Products Tech Lead @ Stripe # quotes https://staffeng.com/stories/michelle-bu > [!quote] > One concrete example from recent memory is when another staff-plus engineer and I categorized the shapes of APIs we commonly see: labeling some as flows, some as engines, some as configs, etc. The intent of this work was to build up a shared mental model and vocabulary for categorizing existing APIs and for discussing and designing new ones. Folks started to organically use these categories after seeing them once! It’s in these moments that I feel like I’m creating leverage and scaling my own impact by disseminating useful mental models and ideas. > [!quote] > I spend time on several of our review forums like API Review, but often these sorts of forums work more like code review. They happen so late in the design process that they tend to do a better job of preventing bad outcomes than of partnering with teams to steer great outcomes. I feel more impactful when I’m able to give engineers on product teams the tools to design great APIs. > [!quote] > By reading through the details of each incident, I’m able to estimate the distance between the reality of our systems and the idealized architecture / product that I spend my days thinking about. I want to know the shapes of issues that engineers are running into, the pits of failure they’re falling into, and how the developer environment was or wasn’t supporting them in getting out of those pits. I see myself as an advocate of engineers to leadership, so it’s important for me to deeply understand our present reality. > [!quote] > We created a canonical document that defines our idealized abstractions. Even today, folks working on that team use these abstractions as a north star: ![[Pasted image 20230126171213.png]] > [!quote] > In making sure new engineers could onboard onto a pretty complex product that involved a ton of IFRAME-shenanigans, I wrote a lot of documentation. I found that telling a story worked well for teaching folks why things needed to be the way they were ![[Pasted image 20230126171300.png]] #storytelling > [!quote] > No part of Stripe's product was "not my problem." This developed into two superpowers that are perhaps even more important to have as a Staff-plus Engineer than technical superpowers are: > 1. Truly listening to and empathizing with others. > 2. A deep care for solving all types of problems. # concepts - We need to understand the realities of our product in order to tell the right story. This requires a distributed team to have a shared mental model. - Evergreen "top 3" living document of current WIP, good to compare against [[What shape do you fill]] and [[What do you want to be when you grow up]]