2017 In Review — My Tech Life

Brand New programming language and one solution OR …

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...

Programming / Software Engineering — Think Paper, Paper, then Code

Most of the software engineering problems are solved in what I call the high-level brainstorming sessions. We basically walk into a meeting room and white-board our thoughts and come up with solutions. When things start falling apart, you better believe this happens in the last stretch of projects and it does work. Now the issue is that we as programmers do NOT do the similar type of exercise before a line of code is written ? I typically see developers get requirements in the form of a document or a user story or in the form of walk-by requirements. The next thing I see on developers’ screens is code editors or IDEs. Is that the right thing to do? You may say that you are advanced enough and that you like to dive into coding right away, but this happens even to the best of us. We fall into this trap and rarely step back and review our habits. We have to go back to fundamentals. What did we do in school? Professors taught us to write down our thoughts and to show what...

Owning and improving what you have is a sign of maturity in software engineering — Is it?

Re-factoring vs. Re-Writing? A lot of times we heard the talks about “Never be satisfied” in the context of innovation and driving your teams forward. In that context, this is totally fine, but when this mindset gets blindly used in the software engineering low level details, then you could be constantly re-writing code without taking the effort to truly understand it. Is this the right thing for business? Is it costly? Re-factoring means that you took time to understand what you have, and you are improving it. On the other hand, re-writing does not necessarily mean that you took the time to understand the low-level details; it may mean that you went back to requirements and decided to re-write it without trying to understand the low-level details. There could be something in those details that you need to know so you don’t make the same mistake again in the process of re-writing it. At the end of the day, if you are constantly re-writing code, t...

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