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…

Are they just different ways of solving the same problem? — You’ve likely watched lots of tutorials on inheritance and composition, and my guess is you’re still slightly puzzled by their utility or when to pick one over the other. For our example, we’ll work with a schedule model with a few variations, such as triggering daily or weekly. Also, we’d…

You’ll rarely ever need to branch on a discrete value. — I’ve mentioned this a tonne already, and this won’t be my last, but branching on discrete values using switch cases and if-else statements is often a terrible idea. Each if, each else, and each case adds needles cognitive and cyclomatic complexity to your codebase.

Experienced developers are guilty of bad designs as well. — You’ve likely watched countless tutorials and read software design books all telling you how interface-based, explicit dependencies allow you to create loosely coupled classes. “New is glue,” right? The dogma is to let your classes take explicit dependencies as a constructor or method parameter rather than newing up an object…

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…

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. …

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…

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…

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? if-else is often a poor choice, especially if you want to…