Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

How to Slow Down to Go Faster Than Ever in Software Development

While reading through “How to Slow Down to Go Faster Than Ever in Software Development” I couldn’t help but nod my head in agreement continuously. The article goes over the well-known and familiar challenges in software development, but it also words them in a very simple and straight-forward way. It’s difficult to disagree with.

Here are a few quotes to get you started.

As Robert C. Martin mentions on the primary value of software at CleanCoders, “The ability of a software system to tolerate and facilitate such ongoing change is the primary value of software”. Rushing is evil in software development. Any attempt to rush causes dramatic damage in productivity, focus, people’s effectiveness, adaptation capability, and tolerance of software.
For instance, we always have time for fixing bugs, but no time for writing tests. We don’t refactor and write tests because we don’t have enough time. But we have time for debugging, hacking code and fixing bugs.
We focus on processes so much that we often forget the main asset in software development: people. Processes help people to improve the way they build products, increase motivation and cultivate a healthy environment. In the end, the efficiency of processes is important, but people are crucial.

Processes and tools do not build products, but people do. We have to admit, “talent hiring” is the most important functionality of an organization. It has direct impact on the future of the company and the product itself.
Hire the best talent for your organization. By saying “the best”, I do not mean the smartest, or most experienced people around. I look for passion, discipline and motivation at a minimum. If all three exists in a talent, the other skills can grow with ease. Hiring is a win-win process, so both sides should gain from the process. So you should slow down your hiring process and invest on improving it. People join companies in which they believe. So model the behavior you want to see. And through your company culture, your vision and people, make talent believe in you.

One thing is clear. Without having a quality codebase, you cannot be agile, sorry. The first thing you need to do is eliminate technical debt and resolve bugs. If you need to stop building the features for a while, and focus on eliminating bugs.
“Fixing bugs and deploying to servers afterwards” is not a proper procedure today. It contains risks and danger. We need a better and more disciplined way of doing it. When you want to fix a bug, first write a test and reproduce the problem programmatically. Then fix the bug and see that the tests are passing. Deploying to production is safe afterwards.

Professional Programming

Professional Programming is yet another excellent list of resources, such as books, articles, and courses, for people pursuing programming as a professional career.

The more, the better, I say.

Vim: persistent undo

Learning Vim is an endless process. Even after using it for two decades I still keep discovering new settings, features, and plugins that significantly improve my productivity.

The other day I came across “Ask HN: Best things in your bash_profile/aliases?” thread, with plenty of tips and tricks. One particular comment highlighted a feature that I kind of heard about but never got to setting up – persistent undo.

It turns out that starting with Vim 7.3 you can preserve the undo history between editing sessions. Which means that you make changes to a file, save it, close it, and when you reopen it later, you can press ‘u’ to undo the changes you’ve done during the last edit.

In order to set this up, you first need to create a folder, where Vim will store the undo history files. For example:

$ mkdir ~/.vim/undodir

Then, you need tell Vim that you want to use persistent undo and where to store the files. Edit the .vimrc file and add the following:

set undofile
set undodir=~/.vim/undodir

As long as you are using Vim 7.3 or newer and the directory exists, your persistent undo history will work like a charm.

Read the rest of the thread for more tips on how to clean it up periodically, and how to further improve your experience with Vim’s undo, using plugins that help navigate the undo tree.

UK’s ICO Guide to GDPR

Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the the UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.

They have published their own Guide to GDPR, which I find somewhat better than this one from the European Union.

Reading postmortems

Once in a while a seemingly straightforward article turns into a goldmine of links and resources. This happened to me today with this one – “Reading postmortems“.

Not only this article itself is a very nice roundup of common sources for system failures, but it also links to a couple of awesome references:

  • Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems. This is both a talk and a paper.
  • danluu/post-mortems – a GitHub repository with a collection of publicly available postmortems from a variety of organizations, like Google, Amazon, Facebook, NASA, GitHub, and more.

If you still have no idea what postmortem is, Wikipedia explains.