by Bozho | Mar 9, 2019 | Aggregated, Developer tips, developers, Opinions, software engineering
I was thinking the other days – why writing good code is so hard? Why the industry still hasn’t got to producing quality software, despite years of efforts, best practices, methodologies, tools. And the answer to those questions is anything but simple. It involves economic incentives, market realities, deadlines, formal education, industry standards, insufficient number of developers on the market, etc. etc. As an organization, in order to produce quality software, you have to do a lot. Setup processes, get your recruitment right, be able to charge the overhead of quality to your customers, and actually care about that. But even with all the measures taken, you can’t guarantee quality code. First, because that’s subjective, but second, because it always comes down to the individual developers. And not simply whether they are capable of writing quality software, but also whether they are actually doing it. And as a developer, you may fit the process and still produce mediocre code. This is why my thoughts took me to the code from the eyes of the developer, but in the context of software as a whole. Tools can automatically catch code styles issues, cyclomatic complexity, large methods, too many method parameters, circular dependencies, etc. etc. But even if you cover those, you are still not guaranteed to have produced quality software. So I came up with seven questions that we as developers should ask ourselves each time we commit code. Is it correct? – does the code implement the specification. If there is no clear specification, did you do a sufficient effort to find out the expected behaviour. And is that...
by Bozho | May 23, 2018 | Aggregated, developers, Opinions, side projects
Side projects are the things you do at home, after work, for your own “entertainment”, or to satisfy your desire to learn new stuff, in case your workplace doesn’t give you that opportunity (or at least not enough of it). Side projects are also a way to build stuff that you think is valuable but not necessarily “commercialisable”. Many side projects are open-sourced sooner or later and some of them contribute to the pool of tools at other people’s disposal. I’ve outlined one recommendation about side projects before – do them with technologies that are new to you, so that you learn important things that will keep you better positioned in the software world. But there are more benefits than that – serendipitous benefits, for example. And I’d like to tell some personal stories about that. I’ll focus on a few examples from my list of side projects to show how, through a sort-of butterfly effect, they helped shape my career. The computoser project, no matter how cool algorithmic music composition, didn’t manage to have much of a long term impact. But it did teach me something apart from niche musical theory – how to read a bulk of scientific papers (mostly computer science) and understand them without being formally trained in the particular field. We’ll see how that was useful later. Then there was the “State alerts” project – a website that scraped content from public institutions in my country (legislation, legislation proposals, decisions by regulators, new tenders, etc.), made them searchable, and “subscribable” – so that you get notified when a keyword of interest is mentioned in...
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