Untitled Coding Blog

To be honest, I would have never guessed that      I would end up saying these these things, especially jn the beginning of my career. As you become more experienced, you kind of get to see everything and you become less impressed by new things. Honestly there is some sort of repetitiveness in this field and we kind of like to reinvent the wheel quite often, because well, we become a bit too easily bored. Take for example how the web looks now, a lot of it has been borrowed from other places, mostly desktop development, especially the parts about making custom reusable components.  Or from older frameworks, like state management in the UI which actually was first properly implemented in Asp .Net Webforms, as far as I know, something like 20 years ago, where you used to have the dreaded view state.  But most likely something similar existed before that too. I was not that surprised when React adopted initially this idea. Or even less surprised when hooks where in...

 This past year I finally made a big leap in my career and joined on of the leading companies in this the software industry, it's been one of my lifelong dream to join such a company and now it happened. It's been quite a journey and I noticed a lot of things so far that I would have never imagined.  Firstly, the scale of things is something that completely blows my mind. I never thought that I would be part of tens of teams, just in my local division in geographical region. Everything is massive and scattered around the globe with hundreds of teams out there. And getting so many teams to work together is really a challenge, especially making sure that they don't constantly reinvent the wheel.  Or another very challenging aspect is the fact that no team is actually alone and depends on the work of many others teams. Here I noticed several skills that are really useful which I never though of before. One of the skills is getting the right information and reaching the...

 Lately I have been kind of stumbling into a couple of issues related to technical debt, a bit more than I really wanted to so I guess it's time to write about this some things. Also, some ideas about this have been brewing in the back of my head for some time now so now is the moment to write all of it. The first thing that comes in my mind when thinking about technical debt is how big is the area affected by it. In the best of circumstances it might affect just a specific area in an application, usually a specific feature because of bad implementation, unclear requirements, various disruptions, tight deadlines or many other reasons. This kind of technical debt usually doesn't have a wide ranging negative impact because it's local to a specific area. The only concerning case it when it affects a critical feature that it used often and updated often, even by other features. On the next level, several areas of an application might be affected by some technical debt issue. Th...

Since 2020 was pretty much a year spent locked inside the house, eventually I was bored and didn't have much to do except to sit all day in front of a screen, I decide to try my luck at some big companies, at least to get my foot at their doorstep with some interviews. Now to apply for these companies and to actually get a semi decent chance to pass the phone interview, also known as the phone screening, you need to learn standard algorithmic stuff taught in the first years of university. This meant relearning a bit one of the most painful courses in university that I did, that "slaugthered"  many students, like "Programming and Algorithms" or "Algorithm design".  "Luckily" for me, I was stuck inside my house so I didn't really have anything better to do. I started with a book, the standard book for interviewing at these companies called "Cracking the coding interview". I pretty much finished it in around 6 weeks by reading 4-5 ...

 I haven't really written here in a long time so it's time to write some new things. These are just some random common sense things that seemed to short to write about individually but seem really interesting and useful to me or other people 1. There is nothing fixed in software development, all things vary by circumstances and time Remember the documentation that didn't seem that important when you started the project, well after a couple of years one the application has grown and become really complicated, no one actually knows everything about the application anymore. So now you really need that documentation. What happens if you suddenly need much more people to develop the application because of some explosive growth? Without documentation, new developers will just look at the application like they look at a painting. This actually happened to me. Maybe in the beginning of a project, a technology really helped you a lot but as the project grew, it started making things...

This is probably one of the most controversial things that I have written so far but I am just tired of hearing about these things and discussing these things. Other developers that I know share part of my feelings. I would rather hear more about how people built things, overcame challenges or what new interesting ideas and concepts they implemented. Those things are really interesting and innovative, not hearing about the same theoretical things over and over again. I can just read and learn those things from 100 sources on the internet. Firstly, one of the most discussed and promoted things is agile/scrum development. I think I have been through 5-8 workshops about agile development methodology. And each time, some things differed. There is no 100% standard approach to this. Everyone uses their own version of this development methodology and seem to argue a lot that their approach is right and everyone else is doing it wrong. You go to an interview, this will be one of the first 10 t...

I keep hearing more and more that as a software developer you still need soft skills, that soft skills are more important than technical skills and so on. But no one really has any concrete ideas about what these soft skills actually mean as a developer. Everyone just keeps talking about them but I don't see anyone actually going into details about them with concrete examples. Not to mention that a lot of people are just trying to make money out of these things and when they say that soft skills are important it is usually followed by some self advertising about their soft skills trainings. And to make matters worse, some of these preachers, pardon people, don't have a lot of experience in the development field. Some of them are not that good developers and then they say, that not only technical skills matter but also soft skills. Maybe they are not so great developers because they also don't have good enough soft skills also. Now on to the concrete part of soft skills....

Lately I had to do more presentations ranging from technical ones about various technologies to other presentation about projects that I work on or even tools that I made for developers and testers. I didn't learn a big list of things from them but rather a couple of really important things to keep in mind when doing a presentation. To begin with, as a presenter your purpose is to make people understand what you are explaining first and foremost. I have seen all too many experienced developers trying to impress the audience when presenting something. They use a lot of pompous language, terms and jargon to make things seem more complicated than they really are. This is just to feed their own ego, to send a subliminal message to the crowd over the lines of: "Look at me how good I am, I managed to understand and apply these things which sound really complicated when I tell them". Imagine if they used a more simple language and a language which is less scary and intimid...

I keep hearing all sorts of things about being a senior developer, senior software engineer and so on. I especially hear how people from new people to this field how they want to become a senior developer as soon as possible and how having "senior" in your title means everything. Or I hear a lot when a new team is formed that everyone wants as many "senior" developers on that team as possible. Fortunately, I learned these things mostly from other people's experiences. And I will be honest here, a lot of the things I will mention next in the post, I am guilty of too or used to be. In general everyone puts accent on being a "senior" something that knows a lot of technical things which impress other people but not many people put enough emphasis on being a grown up adult, a mature developer. Being a mature developer involves a lot of things, having technical knowledge is just a part of them. But it requires other skills and a specific personality too....

For the past years I have talked and interacted with a lot of developers involved in outsourcing, gathering some nasty or challenging parts of their experiences. Fortunately I didn't run into all of them, at most 2 or 3, and not the whole time. Still it takes some skills to overcome them. Firstly, when you work as a developer in outsourcing you pretty much have 2 sets of bosses and managers. One set is at your main company that pays you directly and another set is at the client for which you are actually developing software and whom signed a contract with your company to provide him with some developers, like me. We call him a client but actually there are multiple people at the client involved in the development process. There is usually a product owner that gives you the requirements, stories and things that you need to develop. Besides him, there is usually a technical person too, a technical leader that establishes the development stack. These 2 people can contradict themselv...

This has been boiling in the back of my mind for a while now. A lot of developers talk about antipatterns, patterns, good practices and bad practices. But I rarely hear about how did a bad practice get established during the development process. Or in general, how do various tendencies work during software development. Firstly I will start about features in general, in applications. Not all features are equal in an application, some of them are core part of the applications functionality. And usually these features are known by all the developers in the team, because the application can't work without them. Now imagine that a developer needs to do a new feature in the application similar a bit to a core functionality. Where will he look for ideas and inspiration about how to code the new feature? Of course in a similar core feature known by everyone. So these core features are used as reference a lot of times. Now his can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how those fe...

Lately I started working on a new project at work. We just started laying the foundation for everything and I ran into the problem of how to assign general responsibilities to various components in the code so that we establish some sorts of patterns and standards used everywhere in the code. Some roles and functionalities were already defined, I found this really useful so I decided to write this post. I still have a lot of things to learn. Having an uniform code with a similar structure everywhere makes it really easy to understand. Also having clearly assigned roles to objects makes it easier to understand. 1. "Calculator" functionality If you have a class in which you do some kind of mathematical calculations and comparisons then you should add this in the class name. In general it encompasses some kind of mathematical formula. For example at one point I had to calculate how much fluid I had to allocate for some tubes. In general when you deal with numbers, you will...