Software Engineering Blogger

ARCHITECTURE DIAGRAM representing interactions of your family of microservices is one of many important things to achieve the enterprise-level microservice architecture and microservices. After going through the design and contract definitions of your APIs/microservices, your team needs to put together a single diagram that explains the interaction among microservices (owned by your team) and how these microservices interact with other teams’ microservices. This is basically the blueprint for your team’s work and this picture needs to be constantly updated as you are evolving your services. What does this give you? It gives you the big picture view and it allows you to detect good or bad patterns that you cannot see when you are deep in your code. For example, you may be able to see that you are doing too many direct API calls for something that could be done with pub/sub approach. Almir Mustafic

Microservice Architecture, but NOT microservice mindset? We are on the same team! Let's say we as a company decide to implement the microservice architecture and we also decide to split the teams into domains for each team to own a domain (group of microservices). You may be a member of team A and I may be a member of team B and we are all on the same ship. There is a water leak in your area of the ship, but my side of the ship looks good.  What do we do? Let's help out each other because we are all members/passengers on the same ship. We are all going to the same destination :) Microservice teams were created to pave domain boundaries at the architectural level, but it does not mean that we should create boundaries among members of different domain team members. Yes, the API contracts are definitions for how our services communicate, but for the sake of final destination, we need to tear down those boundaries when it comes to approaching each other for help and proacti

Python-like or C-like as the language to introduce programming to students in high school and university? The question is: Do you introduce programming concepts to high-school/university students using languages that handle memory and other things for you or do you start introducing all of these concepts in languages like C that require you to understand all aspects. I will tell you what worked for me. I was introduced to programming in grade 10 using Basic programming language. There was a version called Better Basic and also Quick Basic. Then in grade 11 we learned procedural programming in a programming language called Turing (not Turing machine but a Pascal-like language developed by University of Toronto for teaching purposes). Then a year later, I started getting interested in C and C++. As you can see, I eased into the languages that introduced me to NULL exceptions and memory leaks :) With this approach I was not overwhelmed and this set up the foundation for a fun journey

Language of software engineers and skills of scrum-masters? All software developers speak the same language and that is pseudo-code :) However, there are still communication issues among software engineers specifically with other teams. That's where the role of great scrum-masters fits in. That great scrum-master does not necessarily need to be technical but he/she needs to have the skills of hearing roadblocks that engineers communicate in their technical language. I said "hearing" and hearing is not the same as listening. Listening is just a pre-requisite for hearing. Once you hear it, now you need to know how to action it and mobilize the right people. Coaching comes along with all of this, but that is a separate topic because it is also a responsibility of the tech manager. These skills separate great scrum-masters from others. Almir Mustafic P.S. Disclaimer: On any given day, I wear a hat of a solutions architect, engineer, scrum-master and tech manager.

Introducing bugs in your software applications? If you are a software engineer and you introduce a bug in your application, it might not be that bad. Let me explain. The best bug you can introduce by accident is the one that fixes/heals an existing more serious problem and introduces a minor problem :) It is all about incremental improvements :) Almir Mustafic

NoSQL? If you are developing your applications for real-time interactions using NoSQL, you still need to pay attention to your data structure even though your database does not enforce it. Your model classes in your choice of programming language are your contract because that NoSQL data has to eventually end up into some form of relational database when you decide to report on it. Almir Mustafic

Authenticity - Step back and think about what makes projects successful; it is not all metrics looking good; it is about intangibles that you can't measure. It is the authenticity of certain individuals, their approaches, and how they let their energy radiate within the team. Recognizing their authenticity is the key to success. Almir Mustafic

Programming is an act of giving a machine some instructions so it can perform things repeatedly. Software engineering is an act of programming and everything else that goes along with it in order to deliver enterprise software to production. Within software engineering, the more time you spend coding your applications and less worrying about DevOps things and processes, the better for you. Make sure you are heading in the right direction. In conclusion, if the act of software engineering was close to the act of programming, then you basically reached that ultimate point in developers’ eyes. Wasn’t the original goal of cloud computing to abstract things for developers so you can ideally only focus on writing code? Almir Mustafic

Software Engineering — Building layers of the cake instead of slices of the cake. In software development you could go into separate rooms and build slices of a cake and combine it all into a single cake hoping to have a good cake. The following alternative is better. Build layers of the cake and that will naturally lead itself to early integrations, early visibility to software functionality from the product management and the end user point of view. Isn’t this what agility is all about? Almir Mustafic

Design for Plan A or Plan A+B? Should you design your system with defensive Plan-B mindset or should you keep it simple thinking optimistically? I don’t think the answer is yes or no. I am talking about the case where you prefer plan A, but the confidence level is not there yet. I think you can design it clean and simple with with hooks in your code so you can harness or feature toggle the plan B functionality. If plan A is chosen then all you need to do is clean up the hooks for the harness or feature toggle that was not needed. Nothing to lose, but you need to have the discipline to clean the unnecessary code when the dust settles down. Thank you for reading. Almir Mustafic

Imagine the world in which feature branches don’t exist. Imagine the world where you don’t delay your code integration (code merges) until 11th hour and you deal with it on daily basis. Imagine the world of just main trunk development in GitHub and development mindset and development capabilities that allow your teammates to see your code sooner rather than later. Pay me now or pay me later is what one of my friends has been saying. Yes, this goes against what everybody is doing out there, but it is worth exploring. It requires the right mindset and technical skills. It ultimately boils down to the following advice that I always give to fellow developers: * Regardless of what branch you are in, when you check in or commit your code changes, pretend that these changes will go into production right away. Then ask yourself a question if my code will negatively impact customers and will it change the customer experience if product team wasn’t intending to do so yet. If the answer to a

Software Engineering… Programming is an act of giving a machine some instructions so it can perform things repeatedly. Software engineering is an act of programming and everything else that goes along with it in order to deliver enterprise software to production. Within software engineering, the more time you spend coding your applications and less worrying about DevOps things and processes, the better for you. Make sure you are heading in the right direction. Let’s say you use a cloud platform to run your applications. The whole point of a cloud platform was to abstract things for developers in order to spend more time coding applications and less worrying about how to set up the resources in the cloud platform. So if you are hiring a lot of DevOps experts, then it means that the platform itself did not abstract the cloud enough. In conclusion if the act of software engineering is close to the act of programming, then you basically reached that ultimate point where your techn

Brand New programming language and one solution OR Two existing programming languages, one solution for EACH? I understand that there is no right or wrong. It all depends on your software architecture, team structure, team skills and other factors, but I still want to explain the scenario as it may look familiar to some. Let me explain. Let’s assume that you have microservices and common libraries in two major programming languages. You have some teams who are experts in one and some teams experts in the other programming language. Now you need to come up with a solution for a scenario that all teams will need to leverage. Let’s assume that your cloud platform has an off-the-shelf approach for this but it is supported by a 3rd programming language that your teams do not have much experience in. What is the right thing for your organization and not just from the technical point of view? A) Do you embrace what your cloud platform gives you off the shelf and implement thi

Imagine the world of software architecture where every POC becomes a production software without changes. That’s one extreme. Now imagine the opposite where no POCs get done and no free innovation happens and everything has to be 110% planned and build perfect from day one. If you and your team can take the good aspects of both extremes and combine into one nice approach, then you will innovate and that innovation will turn into enterprise worthy software. Thank you for reading. Almir Mustafic