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…

Leaders need to be hands-on, every day. — Many organizations believe that strong soft skills and an ability to lead people far overshadows technical expertise when managing technical teams. But, let me tell you, you can’t effectively lead developers if you aren’t a developer yourself. It’s as simple as that. One of the most absurd scenarios in corporate…

Story points are not the answer, and to be honest, I think story points are mostly useless. — How long time does it take to get to work? Don’t answer yet. We’ll get back to this question in a second. Some may say that you’ll never accurately estimate anything. You’ll never get any better at estimating. New things always pop up to invalidate your previous estimates, so what…

Following Modern Agile practices doesn’t make you a better developer. — It feels like Modern Agile lost its focus on individual developer growth and improvement. It is nearly three decades ago since Ken Schwaber and Jef Sutherland first introduced Scrum, and over two decades since Kent Beck introduced the then-novel Extreme Programming methodology. Surprisingly, we’re still struggling with largely the same…

Please, stop right there. — Daily Standup is a status meeting at best and a manager’s opportunity to legitimize micro-management at worst. I get why the 3-questions dogma has become so popular and I really don’t intend to upset any scrum master who follows this ancient, daily ritual. But, when did you last take a…

Let’s investigate how reflection is used for creating extensible applications and frameworks. — I’ve come across several StackOverflow posts postulating to avoid reflection in your own code — and I couldn’t disagree more. I recently held a code session at the client project I’m working on. We dove into reflective programming and how it allows us to write extensible code that is easy…

“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…