Tag: software engineering

Notes to Myself on Software Engineering

I came across these “Notes to Myself on Software Engineering“, with which I agree wholeheartedly. Some of these I’ve learned “the hard way”. For most of these, I wish I knew them earlier. They would make my life a lot easier. Here a few to get you started, but make sure to read the whole list, as many of these apply to other areas of IT and life in general.

It’s okay to say no — just because someone asks for a feature doesn’t mean you should do it. Every feature has a cost that goes beyond the initial implementation: maintenance cost, documentation cost, and cognitive cost for your users. Always ask: Should we really do this? Often, the answer is simply no.

Invest in continuous integration and aim for full unit test coverage. Make sure you are in an environment where you can code with confidence; if that isn’t the case, start by focusing on building the right infrastructure.

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible. Don’t increase the cognitive load of common use cases for the sake of niche use cases, even minimally.

Because code is communication, naming matters — whether naming a project or a variable. Names reflect how you think about a problem. Avoid overly generic names (x, variable, parameter), avoid OverlyLongAndSpecificNamingPatterns, avoid terms that can create unnecessary friction (master, slave), and make sure you are consistent in your naming choices. Naming consistency means both internal naming consistency (don’t call “dim” what is called “axis” in other places) and consistency with established conventions for the problem domain. Before settling on a name, make sure to look up existing names used by domain experts (or other APIs).

Career progress is not how many people you manage, it is how much of an impact you make: the differential between a world with and without your work.

Software development is teamwork; it is about relationships as much as it is about technical ability. Be a good teammate. As you go on your way, stay in touch with people.

When we find ourselves in a conflict, it’s a good idea to pause to acknowledge our shared values and our shared goals, and remind ourselves that we are, almost certainly, on the same side.

Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model

“Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model” is an interesting take on the problem of bad estimations in software projects. I’m not that great with math, but even then the article is very interesting. And there is a lot that I agree with.

Here’s a quote for those of you who couldn’t make it through:

Why software tasks always take longer than you think

Assuming this dataset is representative of software development (questionable!), we can infer some more numbers. We have the parameters for the t-distribution, so we can compute the mean time it takes to complete a task, without knowing the σ for that task is.


While the median blowup factor imputed from this fit is 1x (as before), the 99% percentile blowup factor is 32x, but if you go to 99.99% percentile, it’s a whopping 55 million! One (hand wavy) interpretation is that some tasks end up being essentially impossible to do. In fact, these extreme edge cases have such an outsize impact on the mean, that the mean blowup factor of any task ends up being infinite. This is pretty bad news for people trying to hit deadlines!

Our Software Dependency Problem

“Our Software Dependency Problem” is a great article going in-depth into the subject of the dependency management during software engineering.

Dependency managers have scaled this open-source code reuse model down: now, developers can share code at the granularity of individual functions of tens of lines. This is a major technical accomplishment. There are myriad available packages, and writing code can involve such a large number of them, but the commercial, legal, and reputational support mechanisms for trusting the code have not carried over. We are trusting more code with less justification for doing so.

Not only it nicely describes the problem in simple terms, but also provides practical examples and solutions to it. In particular, I enjoyed the section that suggests how to improve dependency evaluation in terms of design, code quality, testing, debugging, maintenance, usage, security, and licensing.

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.