coding

Software engineering decision-making is a stressful and time-consuming process. When the stakes are high, you will be met with opinionated programmers, insurmountable organizational constraints, and unfortunate baggage from old projects. Consensus is difficult. In a previous post, “Staff Software Engineer Responsibilities“, I mention that the act of “Transforming Competing Opinions…

“Runtime” and “Runtime Environment” are some of the most overloaded terms in software development. It’s confusing for everyone; this word means many different things in many different contexts. This post’s goal is to provide you with an intuition behind the many use-cases of “runtime.”

[October 10, 2021] If you enjoy this article, check out my new post on this topic: Staff Software Engineer Responsibilities — Align With Authority. The path of the Staff Software Engineer represents the career progression of a technologist. Senior Engineer leads to Staff Engineer which leads to Principal Engineer which hopefully leads…

I recently read through a Hacker News thread discussing the article “Kafka Is Not A Database”, by Arjun Narayan and George Fraser. The opinions behind this topic are fascinating and I enjoyed sifting through comments from both sides of the table. For the purposes of this post, I’ve labeled these two broad…

Debugging is a critical skill. More important than the skill is the mindset. The debugger’s mindset is the attitude that you must always understand the why behind a problem; any ambiguities or unknowns are unacceptable. This mindset has the potential to carry you from debugging small functions to solving difficult…

Creating a technical plan is a sign of professionalism and maturity as a software developer. No matter what you’re working on, whether it be a straightforward feature extension or a massive data migration, a technical plan must be written. Why Should I Write A Technical Plan? A written plan forces…

Code reviews are an essential part of software development. To be good at the craft, we must be able to review the craftsmanship of others. The more books you read, the better you write; the more code you review, the better you code. The following 12-item code review checklist is…

If you’ve ever hit the tables in Vegas, you’re no stranger to the infamous mathematics surrounding house edge. What is this phenomenon? House edge is a built-in advantage, designed into every game, that guarantees the casinos make their money. This edge can be very small, 1% or less, yet it…

Any developer, with any level of experience, can have bad habits. This is the junior developer neglecting the ripple effect of his changes. It could just as easily be the senior engineer rampaging through the codebase with her rewrites. Bad habits are just habits; they do not define a person…