Write clean, maintainable code without if-else. — You’ve watched countless tutorials using If-Else statements. You’ve probably also read programming books promoting the use of If-Else as the de facto branching technique. It’s perhaps even your default mode to use If-Else. But, let’s put an end to that right now, by replacing If-Else with the state objects. Note…

“I’ll just add one more constructor argument.” — Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of control (IoC) often make you do stupid things and let you create poorly designed software. Dependency Container frameworks such as Java’s Spring Boot or .NET ServiceCollection lets you get away with lazy designs because, when relied upon, you rarely have to think for yourself. …

Everyone talks about how to organize files and folders, but how about the files themselves? Let’s explore files that help onboard new developers. — I realized we rarely talk about the non-code files that help increase collaborative efforts. Have you considered how seniors can help increase the ease of onboarding new developers, and especially more junior staff, simply by adding specific files? 🔔 Become a Medium member or get articles like this to your…

I’ve likely missed a bunch of the stupid things, but these five are quite pervasive. — I’m just going to enumerate a bunch of things I sometimes hear or read developers say, that I believe, make them stay mediocre. If you like this article, you’ll likely also find “how to piss off a developer” entertaining. “Make it as simple as possible.” I honestly don’t think simple solutions are always the best. You’ll…

Logging is never an acceptance criterion but often a requirement. — Logging is a requirement. Yet, it’s rarely — if ever — mentioned in User Stories, acceptance criteria, refinement, planning, or PO/BA discussions. Logging is frequently demoted to an expensive, potentially crippling, afterthought. There’s never a bug saying “oh, I expected this log statement but got nothing.” Logging is a requirement…

Ever had a null pointer exception thrown at you after accessing an entity’s property? Repositories make it safe to use reconstituted entities. — Despite the repository pattern being nearly 20 years old, many modern developers seem to have a hard time wrapping their heads around how it works and what pains it is meant to alleviate. There’s a common misconception that the repository pattern is solely concerned with abstracting data access and providing…

A nice developer experience largely depends on characteristics of good design in software development. — Let’s go beyond the generic, typical characteristics such as “high cohesion”, “low coupling”, and “single reason to change”. Sure, those are all three attributes of great classes. But, this is likely not the first article you read on the topic. Humming in unison with all other tech writers, producing the…

Examples using both System.Text.Json and Newtonsoft. — Searching for how to parse a huge JSON file (60GB) doesn’t really turn up encouraging results. Some answers are outright wrong, misleading, saying you shouldn’t do it at all, or even that it can’t be done. I came across StackOverflow and Quora answers such as “you definitely need to load…

How to write proper repository classes that won’t give you headaches. — The repository pattern is possibly one of the very first widely practical design patterns you learn or apply in a real production application. It’s definitely a pattern worth double-clicking on and internalizing as it has almost become a first-class citizen of any data access layer. The repository design pattern is…