The Engineering Leader

A Moment with Xavier Gouchet

April 05, 2022 Steve Westgarth Season 1 Episode 11
The Engineering Leader
A Moment with Xavier Gouchet
Show Notes Transcript

In this moment Xavier Gouchet, a software engineering team lead at DataDog, shares his approach to Application performance testing and his recommendations for how leaders can help Engineers to create high quality maintainable code.

Xavier Gouchet:

I think one of the one of the advice I would I would give is to not try to be smart. And the best advice would be to say, okay, just first make sure that it works. And that it's, it's easy to understand. So if you can't, if you can't explain what you're doing to five years old, basically, it means that you're trying something too complex.

Steve Westgarth:

That is Zevia Cochet, a software engineering team leader data dog, talking about how engineer should approach writing maintainable code. He also has lots to say about application performance testing.

Xavier Gouchet:

Well, I think one of the the key thing is to try to think about, again, it's the media, but it's the thing about the target audience. So if your application is like, no, for a wider audience, you need to look at what device was. Was popular three years ago, because like, except for, you know, tech savvy users and geeks and developers. I mean, yeah, most people keep the same phone for three, four years. So if you if you say, Okay, let's look at what what phone was popular released three years ago. Make sure that your application works smoothly on this old phone and not on the latest pixel five or late latest iPhone device that just came out two weeks ago. You need to you use your own application all day long as you're developing. And with this frustration, you're going to be very motivated to fix the performance issues.

Steve Westgarth:

We're also going to be chatting about developing Android SDK for the Kotlin Kotlin multi platform jetpack compose the importance of test driven development, and strategies for self development and continuous learning. Every Sunday, I release a new episode of the engineering leader where my guests share best practices for developing customer centric software product. If you enjoy listening to the podcast, please hit the follow or subscribe button. And remember, we all write bad code. If you disagree. You may as well switch off