Untitled Coding Blog

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...

While digging through some standard programming principles like low coupling and high cohesion I stumbled upon the fact that they are part of a larger series of principles called "GRASP" principles. After reading a bit about them, they seem just as important if not more important than the "SOLID" principles And one particular principle from that series stuck with me: protected variations. According to this principle, variations and changes in parts of the application should be contained only in them and not trigger further changes in the application. In general terms points of inflection should be established between the parts that change and the rest of the application which act like a boundary and stop additional changes from propagating to the rest of the application. For example, one of the most common parts that might change in an application, is the data access and storage methods. For example instead of using direct sql to read and write to a database, an...

Over the last couple of months I had the opportunity to interview for one of the most revered companies for any software developer in the world which is Facebook as you have guessed from the title. It was a really unique experience and surprisingly I learned a lot about myself too. It turns out that after all these years building small and maybe some smaller medium sized applications, I have become quite passionate about those kinds of applications. Building these kind of applications allow me to have fun using things that I love the most: object oriented programming, designing functionalities and splitting them into components and using various interesting programming principles or software design principles. It turns out I am very passionate about algorithmic stuff and high performance stuff. I mean I do enjoy them from time to time, but they don't really seem that creative to me. With object oriented programming and various software design principles, you can come up with an...

This has been baking in the back of my head for quite a while now and it happened to me and the team that I am part of, at work, in the last couple of months. I think it is worth analyzing what actually happened and worth keeping the lessons learned in the back of your head all the time, especially during estimations. Now on with the story. Initially when I joined the company I currently work at, we started slowly doing work and getting to know the application with its business logic. We had a lot of doubts in the beginning. So during the estimation meetings at the beginning of a sprint, we were constantly unsure of the tasks that we had to estimate. At first glance this seems like something bad but it actually had a silver linning. That doubt kept us analyzing the tasks that we had to do more in depth. We also looked into existing code more often which helped us too. And quite often we would discover hidden issues that at first glance were not so obvious, issues like hidden depend...