Dan Heller is a Staff Software Engineer in Infrastructure at Uber. In earlier lives, he has led reliability efforts on Uber Eats, built monitoring systems at AppDynamics, helped port iOS to the ARM64 architecture as a Kernel Engineer at Apple, directed the responses to dozens of high-stakes production outages, and managed teams of up to 25 engineers.

Along the way, the author discovered a love of mentorship and had the good fortune to mentor tens of talented engineers. Those engineers inspired him with their hundreds of questions about career paths, technical tradeoffs, and day-to-day effectiveness; when a short blog post on those themes brought a riot of responses about maturing professionals' need for guidance, the author set out to fill the gap with this book.