Christian Ampe

If you're a TDD hater or even just a skeptic, I'd love for you to attend the session linked in the comments (2 hours from this posting) & then let's have a conversation here. I'll cover the history of TDD, some misunderstandings, and future work.

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How to make offices less distracting (and more productive): * Make smaller floor sections w less seats * Sight / Sound blockers on desks * Provide enough meeting rooms This removes most sources of unwanted distractions.

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It’s official: landing a software engineering job is tougher now than it was just a few years ago. With many startups shutting down and big companies laying off employees, candidates with 0-5 years of experience are feeling the pinch. What can you do? Shift your storytelling from tools and languages to the impact you've made. Highlight who your users were, how you improved their lives, and any recognition you received. Remember, outcomes matter more than just the technologies you used!

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Can someone explain to me how to get "more experience"? I have 16 years of full stack software engineering experience, mostly in C# .Net 4.2 through 8, including .Net Core 2.x & 3.x, along with WCF, WPF, Winforms, Razor/Blazor, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with Entity Framework, Dapper, Linq, SQL Server, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, NoSql, and other databases. And a few of those years include a combination of Java, PHP, and C/C++. I've also used MarkDown, PowerShell, MVC framework, Swashbuckle/Swagger, Newtonsoft, JSON .Net, TopShelf, and a variety of testing frameworks. But apparently that's not enough. In the past 3 years alone, I've learned ReactJS, TypeScript, Xamarin, XAML, Maui, NodeJS, Terraform, AWS, and Azure, and I'm currently learning Angular, but that doesn't cover the 3-5 years of experience jobs want. I've learned some of these skills through jobs, but also some on my own. Except that as often as companies want us to learn these skills outside of work, they only count professional experience when it comes to hiring. My last interview said I needed more experience, as if the previously mentioned 16 years wasn't enough, and neither was the 15 years of computer repair and networking before that, which their interview questions also covered. So if no one is willing to hire because people don't already have experience, how are we supposed to get the experience? And don't say "open source projects", because they don't count as professional experience. Or do I have to take a 50% pay cut to take an "entry level" job that still requires 3-5 years of experience that I somehow still don't have? People are quick to say that "no one wants to work anymore" when they can't get hired, but they never seem to think "businesses aren't willing to teach anymore" when they refuse to hire people. Why? Is it that we are so conditioned to think that it's always the individuals fault for not living up to expectations, instead of the businesses fault for setting unrealistic and ever changing expectations? So, I ask again, how can I get the required experience when employers refuse to hire unless I already have experience?

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Wonderful Explanation of Spring and Spring Boot ... #softwaredevelopers #javadevelopers #javadeveloper #recruiterwings #learninganddevelopment #springbootframework #springframework

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Are we focusing too much on advanced tech problems at the expense of foundational skills? This post struck a chord with me, highlighting a critical but often overlooked aspect of learning in tech. We often chase complex solutions and high-level abstractions popularized by industry giants, losing sight of the fundamental skills that are crucial for our growth. Many developers might naturally invent these advanced solutions when needed, if they focused on mastering the basics first. Yet, the emphasis remains low on understanding core principles like coupling, cohesion, and writing reliable, bug-free code—issues that truly plague enterprise software. It’s time to realign our learning priorities.

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Well said. The alarmism around AI replacing software engineers often overlooks the complexity of our role. While AI tools like Devin are impressive, they are assistants, not replacements. 𝟏. 𝐂𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐬 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐚𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠. 𝟐. 𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐫 𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞, 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧-𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬-𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. 𝟑. 𝐔𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐬𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐬. 𝟒. 𝐄𝐱𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐮𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐥, 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧-𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐞𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. AI will definitely reshape our workflows, but it won't replace the need for skilled engineers. Instead, it may allow us to focus more on high-level problem-solving and innovation. Arvind Telharkar 👏

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Ive come to like TDD much more lately. I'm still learning to be better at it. But it becomes a productive game where you are just excited to get that serotonin hit every time you make that test go green. TDD. Test Driven Development made popular by Kent Beck. Consists of making the tests the main driver to writing code effectively. - Red - Write test code that is broken with code you anticipate you'll write. Thinking of writing towards a contract that doesn't exist yet. - Green - Write the min amount of code to make the previous step pass. yay! - Refactor - apply clean code/design principles and make it maintainable. Keep going til your feature is done ✅ #softwareengineering #tdd

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Software agents change coding. AI agents will build the same feature 10 times and select the best version. No limits, no guesswork—just optimized innovation. This is a radical new mindset: iterative, faster than ever, and powered by AI. 🚀 Nikita Shamgunov, CEO of Neon, is focused on the architecture of the future and creating for these next wave of agentic and code-gen applications powered by LLMs. A world where cost, infrastructure, and time barriers are tackled and AI agent development unleashes innovation at scale. The future of software development is parallel, not linear! And we'll need GenAI Friendly serverless database like Neon to make it possible. Watch the full episode to discover: - How serverless Postgres is enabling the next wave of AI-powered apps - Why "breadcrumbs" are crucial for AI agent systems - The architecture behind instant database branching 

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Here’s a bit of a hash truth: You’ll never pay off your tech debt in full. I know that can be hard to hear—especially if you’re anything like me and you don’t like to carry any actual debt. But software tech debt tends to accumulate in our codebases faster than we can keep up with it, so it’s essentially impossible to keep a balance of zero at all times. Here’s some good news though: You don’t need to pay it all off. The key to a maintainable codebase is not eliminating tech debt completely, but identifying your highest-priority pieces and paying those off first. There are many different frameworks we can use to evaluate a piece of tech debt, but one that I like in particular because of its simplicity is the one developed by the Riot Games team. With this framework, we evaluate each tech debt task using three different metrics: 💥 Impact — how much damage is the tech debt doing? Is it causing bugs, slowing your team down, hurting performance, or maybe a combination of all of those? 💰 Fix Cost — how much time and effort do you need to spend in order to pay this tech debt off, and what’s the opportunity cost? (i.e., what else could you be doing with your time instead of handling this piece of tech debt?) 🦠 Contagion — how much will the tech debt spread if you don’t fix it as soon as possible? For instance, a high-impact, high-contagion piece of tech debt with a relatively low cost is a good candidate for paying off as soon as possible. On the other hand, if paying off a piece of tech debt is too expensive and isn’t negatively impacting the codebase, then it might make more sense to carry on with that debt. In general, you can think of the impact and contagion metrics as the interest rate of your tech debt. With a high interest rate, it’s better to pay it off as soon as possible. But if the interest rate is zero (or near zero), postponing it might make more sense. Remember that the goal is not to eradicate tech debt from your codebase—that’s just impossible. Your job as a codebase maintainer is to prioritize your ever-growing list of tech debt so you can focus on the most impactful pieces first. If you’d like to learn more about this framework, check out this issue of the Frontend at Scale newsletter: https://lnkd.in/guqdTfwP And if you have any fun (in retrospective) tech debt stories to tell, share them in a comment below 👇

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Donuts are a simple allegory for software projects. You can divide a single donut up among a few people, but if you just take a bite no one will eat the rest of the donut. Worse, if you do take that bite, you will have to carve off more than you want before the rest gets taken. The lesson here is a simple one: Divide the work ahead of time or commit to eating the whole donut.

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*Bracing myself for the response I might get for asking this* Software Engineers: Would you ever consider working on an EQUITY ONLY basis (ie no salary, just owning a portion of the business, the value of which would increase as it progresses and scales)? Assuming: - The product is really interesting and so is the work - The product is in the "tech for good" space and would be a really positive contribution to parts of society - Seed funding is confirmed to be coming with several backers keen & they will able to offer a salary in the near future - The product is super early stage, you would be writing the software from the ground up, but the concept, design and business model once funding is received are all solid I know that there will be many who would never consider this under any circumstances and I totally get why, but just curious to hear if any of you would if it was for a product you believed in enough? And would you look at it on a full-time basis or a part-time basis? It's something I got asked about and so I thought I would throw it out to Linkedin to see what you all think rather than assuming that I know the answer on your behalf. #startup #founder #softwareengineer

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Watched a portion of the old Brian Will video on why OOP is bad (https://lnkd.in/epvfRpPR), and bombed out fairly hard when he came out with the puzzling assertion that messages between objects properly speaking shouldn't include object references. Well, there goes your visitor pattern; there goes the UI staple of registering objects with some event bus for callbacks when particular events happen. Is there some source in the literature (Alan Kay, I guess) for this odd restriction? It seems like a basic misapprehension: sure, messages should transfer representations of internal state and not haphazardly leak references to the state itself (otherwise external parties can mutate it without going through the owning object's protocol), but it's also a pretty basic affordance of message-passing systems that the addresses of things that can receive messages are first-class things that can be passed around (compare URIs in REST, or channels in pi calculus). The other odd assertion was that permitting many objects in an arbitrary graph to hold a reference to an object and access its methods was as bad as having global shared state. It fairly obviously isn't: the ability to exercise the protocol for reading or updating a particular bit of state can get passed around to wherever it needs to be, but isn't immediately available to everything, and pretty much the whole point is that you're passing a pointer to the protocol, not the rights to inspect and modify the data structures it guards. It seems that Will wants to argue for a hierarchical flow of messages down a DAG-shaped stack of routines and subroutines with a single controlling root procedure, rather than a potentially cyclic call graph with objects fielding requests from all angles. In practice that's what your average Spring Boot service actually does of course: controller to service to persistence or external client layer, and back up again. But (and this is an argument for a future post) that's because the average Spring Boot service is fundamentally procedural code, with a bit of indirection between modules. Other topologies are possible, and appropriate for particular use cases. The most generous reading I can give of Will's argument is that OOP offers more flexibility than perhaps a majority of actually existing programs really need, and we'd be happier and less burdened by object bureaucracy if we wrote those programs in a more constrained idiom. I actually think that's kind of true, but haven't got to the bottom of what it means in practice just yet.

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“There’s no jobs for Jr Software Engineers out there!” NOT TRUE…But there are some major issues in today’s hiring market. 1. MISALIGNED FOUNDATIONAL EXPERIENCE: The majority of aspiring SEs are either: Recent CS grads (less hands-on exp); OR, Bootcamp grads (less theory). Meanwhile...Most enterprise companies who hire a ton of SEs are looking for CS grads that ALSO have hands-on experience already. 2. MISALIGNED TECH STACKS: The majority of aspiring SEs are only experienced in NodeJS and/or Python. Meanwhile…Most of the companies who hire a ton of SEs are using Java or C# backends. Companies using NodeJS or Python backends are often smaller and can't hire as many SEs. That’s why our Enterprise Accelerator is making a difference. We identify diverse CS grads who are hungry, and we teach them the hands-on Java skills that companies are using in the real world over 3 months. Best of both worlds 😎 If you're interested in seeing some of this kind of talent--send me a DM and we'll get you connected. Want to join our next Enterprise Accelerator cohort? Stay tuned for the next webinar in early August.

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Once you hit the #SeniorDev title, your career as a #SoftwareEngineer can go one of three ways. All of these are legitimate decisions and don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise! 1. Management -> This is the oldest and likely the most well-known option. You can head into management and start developing careers of those younger than you. If you love mentoring others and like focusing more on the non-technical management of a project, this is probably the route you want! 2. Staff -> The term "#StaffEngineer" is relatively new to the industry. Many think its title bloat, but I disagree! I think the industry as a whole saw that we needed a new role and we created it. (See my blog on https://iamsellek.com for in-depth info on what a Staff Engineer role looks like!) If you prefer to work in the tec, and you enjoy the bigger-picture aspects of running a codebase/project from the technical side, this might be the route you want! 3. Stay Senior -> Some people look down on this option. Those people are wrong. If you love writing code and doing some light mentoring, there's nothing at all wrong with sticking around as a Senior dev! Some people spend their entire careers here. TLDR? Figure out what you like best about your job. If you prefer mentoring and the non-technical aspects of managing a project, you can head into management. If you want to focus more on the technical side of managing a project and/or a codebase, go with Staff! And if you're happy where you're at, there's nothing wrong sticking with Senior Dev. Now go seize your future! #career #SoftwareEngineer #CareerLadder #future

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Senior Devs / Hiring Managers—during our live webinar yesterday, we polled a few hundred recent Comp Sci grads. 60% didn’t feel that they had enough experience in Java to qualify for an enterprise coding job. Instead they’d been pointed towards Python. 80% had no experience with Unit Testing. I know Comp Sci isn’t just about software engineering; but it’s by far the largest number of available jobs for grads. If jobs are the metric that Higher Ed is judged on, this seems like a huge failure. Does this line up with your experience? How are you dealing with this skills gap when you look to onboard junior talent?

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How did Uber speed up their test execution? Engineers at Uber make thousands of code changes every day. This cascades into hundreds of thousands of tests, which take time to run. One major problem is tests failing randomly. This happens because a program may have a non-deterministic order of execution (processing requests in multiple threads). Such tests are difficult to debug and require deeper human analysis. Uber makes a tradeoff here: If a test is flaky (passes sometimes and fails sometimes), mark it for analysis and ignore its result. This could result in lesser test coverage, but at least the result of the test execution is repeatable. That makes the CI pipeline more reliable. Uber's Testing Stats: - 5,000+ developers - 2,500+ pull requests/day - 10,000+ tests for some critical PRs - All tests must successfully run to ensure reliability and performance The Solution: Testopedia Uber built Testopedia, a service that identifies flaky tests: - It uses a Sliding Window Algorithm (failed once in last X runs) - It also uses Frequency-based algorithms (failure rate exceeds the threshold in last N runs) Testopedia handles flaky tests using the following techniques: - Critical tests run regardless of flakiness - Developers are allowed to switch flaky tests ON or OFF for every PR - Flaky tests can be run asynchronously in non-blocking mode - Relevant teams are notified about flaky tests (batched by domain/prefix/severity) Benefits: - The impact of flaky tests on developer productivity is minimized - Test suites remain reliable and performant - High test coverage is ensured without compromising velocity Concurrent code is a challenge to write, and an even bigger challenge to test! When they break, it's tempting to ignore them rather than fix them. Hence, Formal Verification :p --- Check out InterviewReady's system design course. It comes with free access to 60+ HLD practice questions, live discussions and lifetime course access - https://interviewready.io/ --- #Uber #Tests

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