Opinionated Perspective
Why “write code juniors understand” is terrible advice
“Don’t use that construct (syntax, approach, pattern, or whatever), juniors won’t understand it!”
This makes perfect sense from a management point of view since we can get away with hiring less experienced people.
Continuously dumbing down code only makes sure your junior developers stay dumb.
Dumbing down your code to…
Practical Engineering Guide
Best practices for creating pull requests and doing code reviews.
Changelist, patch, pull request, no matter the name only a few things can get as toxic as the process of merging your hard work into the shared codebase.
Some regard code reviews as an invitation to assert their knowledge, voice their unfounded opinions, publicly shame others, telling others how to…
Opinionated Perspective (Short-form)
It’s not your lack of coding skills or critical thinking. It’s your approach.
Do you find software development difficult? Well, you’re not alone.
You can blame the language, the contradictory principles, and methodologies. Blame the ever-changing technological landscape. Maybe it’s the business that doesn’t know what it wants. Maybe you find it too difficult to settle on a tech stack. …
Opinionated Perspective (Short-form)
Clean domain models are persistence agnostic.
I assume most developers interact with their database thru object-relational mapping (ORM) technology. You rarely write raw SQL as an application developer these days.
This brings along a whole new set of issues.
Mixing concerns often lead to bad things in software development. I've found that marrying your domain model…
Opinionated perspective
Don’t write code just to make your ORM happy.
Stop letting your database be in the driver’s seat of your application.
You probably let your database generate your ids. Don’t you? Maybe due to the convenience of it — there’s really nothing convenient about it, though.
How often do you make “pragmatic” decisions about your model? Or slack on…
Practical programming advice
Having more classes does not equal higher complexity.
So, there is a good chance that you’ve used parametric polymorphism already — it’s basically just generics. But, do you know how generics can help you reduce the use of branching statements, such as if-else and other control-flow statements?
How to become a senior developer
Let’s get you up to speed. Fast.
Back when I started programming I ran across concepts and terms I really didn’t understand, like middleware, inversion of control vs dependency injection, traditional branching, service classes, business logic, status codes, and many more.
I’d often interrupt my flow to spend time chasing down the meaning of these — and…
Opinionated Perspective
Arbitrary, self-imposed constraints in the guise of “good practice” should not limit your ability to express your domain.
So, REST obviously didn’t pan out the way we hoped. Large corporations nicely marketed REST to sell their software, kicking off the so-called API economy.
But we should’ve known it wouldn’t work out as expected.
There were a bunch of telltale signs along the way… The general lack of standard…
Opinionated Perspective
So… I heard you worship CRUDy REST interfaces.
Many web developers default to implementing REST APIs in a CRUD-like manner. They’re too focused on sticking with arbitrary, made-up technical rules, losing all sight of the business and its clients.
CRUD over REST might be great for beginner developers and creating PoCs because it’s easy to get started, and…
Opinionated Programming Advice
Following a few guidelines and practices goes a long way.
I’ve applied many different programming styles, practices, and approaches to write more readable code throughout the years.
Some initially seemed great but turned out not to be. Others got outdated, and then there are the few practices that I’m still using.
I’ll just enumerate a list of those that have…
