The Coder Cafe - 66 timeless concepts for software engineers

Great software developers—even the proverbial greybeards—get a little better every day by adding knowledge and skills continuously. This new book invites you to share a cup of coffee with senior Google engineer Teiva Harsanyi as he shows you how to make your code more readable, use unit tests as documentation, reduce latency, navigate complex systems, and more.

The book introduces vital software engineering concepts that will upgrade your day-to-day practice, regardless of your skill level. You’ll find focused advice and explanations—each five pages or less—on everything from foundational data structures to distributed architecture. These timeless concepts are the perfect way to turn your coffee break into a high-impact career boost.

What's inside

• Generate property-based tests to expose hidden edge cases automatically
• Explore the CAP and PACELC theorems to balance consistency and availability trade-offs
• Design graceful-degradation strategies to keep systems usable under failure
• Leverage Bloom filters to perform fast, memory-efficient membership checks
• Cultivate lateral thinking to uncover unconventional solutions

About the reader

For serious and curious software engineers.

About the author

Teiva Harsanyi is a senior software engineer at Google. Previously, he has worked in various domains including safety-critical industries like air traffic management. He is the author of 100 Go Mistakes and How To Avoid Them.