Topic

Thought

A collection of 10 issues

Favour empirical evidence over extended arguments

Often, we get into extended arguments when we have to pick an optimal solution from multiple available options. Especially in the case of science and technology, gathering empirical evidence is a highly effective solution. In this post, I share my experience of a code review. This was the first piece

Accepting our shortcomings is a pre-requisite for an improvement

In the initial days of my professional career, I joined a project as a Software Engineer. Once I got access to the codebase, I started going through the codebase. The project was using JSP technology for the views (server-rendered views). A senior developer from the team was demonstrating the implementation

What is in a Jargon?

During my interactions with engineers in various training programs, I noticed a common trend - they often used the term' story point' instead of 'user story' or simply 'story'. These engineers, all graduates from reputed educational institutions and had interned at well-known software development

Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment

There is a good chance that you would have had several debates on what is the difference between 'Continuous delivery' and 'Continuous Deployment'. I have spent several hours discussing this with different groups. Usually, 'Continuous Delivery' implies keeping your software in the releasable state

Don't fall in love with your code

I was mentoring this developer, and he was working on a piece of UI which involved a lot of JavaScript. The timeframe was before sing-page apps became the norm. So the team was using JQuery. Day by day, the functionality started getting more sophisticated. A part of the feature was

Hot Loading - Still Relevant?

More than a decade ago, when I started my profession as a software developer, one of the most significant pain for developers was waiting for your application server to start so that they could verify their code changes. Hence there were efforts to make live reloading happen without restarting the

Is your first programming language holding you from learning your next language?

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned how I was using the Java syntax of lambda expressions while I was programming with Kotlin. In my observation, whenever we are working on something, if our brain finds a match to what we already know, often end up using the same

IDE generated code - a good idea?

In my previous post I mentioned how pain acted as a trigger to positive action. In this post, let's analyse potential solutions to the problem I had mentioned in the above post and what can we learn from them. At the time of this incident, our team was

Using Pain as a Trigger to Positive Action

Recently I gave a talk titled "Evolving with Java - How to Remain Relevant and Effective" in GIDS on the Java Day of the conference. The talk was centred around using pain as the triggering point for positive action. Let me tell you the incident that triggered this

If you are building your artifacts per environment, you are doing it wrong

I have heard several times developer telling me how they build their artifacts before deploying to each of their environment. Yes, they build a jar for dev and instead of promoting the same jar to their acceptance testing environment, they rebuild the jar specifically for their UAT environment. Here is