Naresha's Blog

Latest — Feb 19, 2025

Is ambiguity in communication a side effect of creativity?

Previously, I had written about how Jargons are not very effective in the IT industry. You might need that context to understand what I will discuss here. I saw similar concerns shared by many professionals from the industry. For example, one post talked about how people use jazzy titles such

More issues

Engineering includes Economy

One of the travel vloggers I occasionally watch recently started a new venture - an E-commerce service for unique traditional products from rural areas. In one of the videos, he mentioned that his website had crashed on launch day. He claimed the crash was due to the high load. It

Java - Static Factory Methods and Autoboxing

While Java's focus on performance made the primitive types inevitable in the language, its commitment to strong backward compatibility made primitives continue to remain in Java. Thus, the divide between primitive types and reference types (objects) continues to exist. This means conversions between primitive and reference types are

Remembering Comment Ratio

Back in my college days, I had studied the "comment ratio" metric in my Software Engineering class. It was still in use when I joined the industry, though nobody on my team gave it much importance. Comment Ratio is the ratio of the number of lines of comment

Groovy - Simplifying null checks with @NullCheck

While null references have their uses in programming, the creator, Tony Hoare, has admitted that creating null references was a billion-dollar mistake. If you consider the method parameters, most of the time, it would be a good idea to ensure that the parameter value is not null. Otherwise, we will

Conferences and Tech Failures

I have been speaking at conferences for about ten years now. Internet failures are common at conferences, and I have seen presenters impacted by these failures. Before speaking at conferences, I have been attending them for many years. Initially, local-first tools like PowerPoint and Keynotes were quite popular for creating

Influence of fluent APIs on Refactoring

Refactoring is applying a transformation to source code, which does not change the code's behaviour. Then, one might ask - what is the purpose of such transformations? It is to change the structure of the code, which results in better maintainability. In this post, we explore an interesting

A tale of an advice gone wrong

This time, it is a story from my college days. By this time, I had owned a PC for about nine months. I had learned a few things from my experiences and failures. I was eager to offer these bits of advice to my classmates, of course, for free. I

Groovy - Intention revealing code with map constructors

"Effective Java" recommends using static factory methods in Java instead of constructors. One reason for this is that static factory methods do a better job at intention revealing than regular constructors. This is because if you have constructors with many arguments, that too multiple arguments with the same

Effective Java with Groovy - Favour Composition to Inheritance

One of the key lessons from the Gang-of-Four Design Patterns is to favour composition over inheritance to achieve better maintainability in our Object-Oriented design. However, most of the codebases written in Java seem to favour inheritance over composition. The main force behind this is the ease of implementing inheritance with