Software Engineering Blogger

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

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...

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...

When you have a problem to solve, what is the most typical way to approach it? Everybody is different, but most of us try to stay within our comfort zone because that’s what makes us feel more stable or more secure. We have one tool and we try to solve all the problems with that tool. When it comes to providing software solutions, you have to step a bit out of that comfort zone in order to innovate and in order to provide flexibility for someone else to innovate. I started my career in Unix/C++ software engineering world years ago. Then I switched to a Microsoft shop at the end of 90s. I’ve been in the Microsoft world ever since, but I’ve shown a bit of interest in other technologies that are from the open-source community. In last few years I started digging deeper into Python, Node.js, and recently back in Java area. I have not been doing this because I am unhappy with what Microsoft had to offer, but I am rather doing it because I want to explore and find out how the open-sou...

I have been doing software development for 18+ years, but I am relatively new to the open-source community. I learned a bit of  Python  back in 2013 and I put it on hold because I was not thrilled with the syntax and code readability as I am used to strongly-typed languages, and I just picked it up again because as I am going through some AWS training and AWS CloudFormation. If you are a Python expert, you should not be on this page :) As I am revisiting Python as a programming language, I figured I would post things as I am learning and putting together examples. That’s the point of this series. DETAILS ON THIS EXAMPLE ARE HERE: http://almirscorner.blogspot.com/p/python-factory-pattern-example.html Almir Mustafic

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...

Great coder != Great software engineer How do you change that sign into an “=” sign? As a software engineer out of college, your initial goals are to get use to the professional working environment. Once you get passed that first hurdle, then it is all about the programming or coding skills. You want to improve your .NET C# skills or Java skills or NodeJS skills or Python skills or database skills. You want to learn the frameworks around these programming languages better and you want to learn different ways to optimize your code and apply different design patterns in your implementations. These are great skills to have and in a lot of cases required skills to have. The most important thing is that you are enjoying what you are doing. At this point you have reached that level that will give you the right to label yourself as a great coder or a great programmer. However, there is still more to go. At this time your main focus is programming and you may be lucky that ...

Estimating projects/initiatives is not easy if you don’t have a right approach. You can be in MS Project land trying to figure out little details, but those details change and then you are stuck maintaining schedules in MS Project. You spend a lot of time tweaking the tool instead of proper planning. A lot of companies are trying to change to use the “Agile” methodology and I am putting the word “Agile” in quotes because there is no company out there that is following exactly what you are taught in ScrumMaster courses and SAFe courses. That means that companies sooner or later end up doing  what works for them  and that could be an approach that belongs somewhere on the line between Waterfall and Agile; for some companies closer to Agile, and for some companies closer to Waterfall. For example a lot of companies get a list of projects/initiatives that need to be  estimated at high-level ,  prioritized  and  approved  by a board before projects c...

I have a saying “There is nothing more final than a POC/Prototype”. Sadly a lot of times an unpolished prototype just becomes your production version of software. On the other hand, we have cases where prototypes fully become a throw-away work.  How do we take a prototype into a final product quickly to see the fruits of your innovations with minimal effort and at the same time not have a drastic difference between the design of a prototype and the design of the final product? In other words, how do we introduce agility and flexibility? What’s on the table. You have the following in the picture regardless of the type of architecture: * Product owners and innovative ideas * Front-End development * Web-tier (server-side) development * Business logic development in some forms of web services or APIs. When you develop prototypes, you can take the Business-Logic component out of the equation most of the time and for the purposes of this article, I will not focus on that p...

Teaching kids about information security is very important today because the social network websites and applications are blurring the line between what should be shared securely and what not. Everybody is busy over-sharing the good, bad and ugly over the internet and in the process of doing that forgetting the basics of information security or never taking the time to learn it. Or is it that nobody is introducing these concepts in school? It is something that needs to be introduced in our education systems from early days. Do you remember the days when we used to send those short messages on a piece of paper in our classrooms? Some encoded those messages because you did not want another person in the middle to open it and understand what it says. How were those messages encoded? The simplest example is: You create a simple mapping for each letter and number in the alphabet. Then you encode your message and write it on a piece of paper. Then the person on the other end decodes...

The perception is that software engineering only care about the low-level details and that’s where they find their motivation. Let’s go to Day 1 out of college and you have a first professional software engineering job. It is overwhelming just to deal with the reality of having a professional job and the junior software engineers are generally all about solving the low-level technical problems and being motivated by the technology that is used in problem solving. Later in your career as a software engineer, you learn the business better and then you start understanding what it takes to deliver an enterprise-level application to production and keep the end customers satisfied. That’s the turning point in your career where you find the motivation in: * Optimizing the code and working on other geeky things * Understanding how your application or your module or your few lines of code relate to the overall revenue numbers and customer satisfaction. Then even further in your caree...