Becoming an engineering manager is not just about climbing the ladder. It is a complete shift in responsibility. You are no longer measured by the code you write or the tasks you complete. Now you are accountable for how the entire team performs. You can delegate work, but you are still responsible for results. If no one owns a problem, you do. That is not an extra detail, that is the job.
Agile is all about flexibility, but that does not mean teams work without organization. To stay aligned, productive, and continuously improve, Agile teams follow structured routines called ceremonies. These ceremonies provide opportunities to plan work, track progress, and reflect on how to get better.
Agile teams are designed to be flexible and collaborative, but that does not mean everyone does everything. To stay effective, Agile teams rely on well-defined roles that help organize work, support decision-making, and keep projects moving forward. While different Agile frameworks may use slightly different role names, three key responsibilities exist in almost every Agile team: the product owner, the development team, and the scrum master.
CQRS stands for Command Query Responsibility Segregation. It's a pattern that separates how an application reads data from how it writes data. This approach can help structure code more clearly, especially in systems that deal with complex business logic or need to scale certain operations differently.
Hexagonal architecture, also called ports and adapters, is a software design approach that helps structure an application by clearly separating the core logic from technical details and external systems. Instead of shaping your app around frameworks, protocols, or storage, you keep your focus on what the application does, and let everything else connect to it through interfaces. The pattern isn't tied to any specific language. The examples in this article are written in PHP to show how the idea can be applied, but the approach works the same way in any backend system.
