Nic Manoogian

The development cycle https://lnkd.in/ggh5NTfh Posted on October 15, 2024 how to clean up code. run your code to make sure it works while (work_to_do){ make a small change test it commit to git } push to git server on local branch try it on another machine collapse git commits for code review test post for code review How to add a new feature run your code make sure it works while (work_to_do){ write a small test while (test doesn’t pass){ make a small change test it } commit to git } push to git server on local branch try it on another machine collapse git commits for code review test post for code review

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holds envelope to forehead: A great product...incredible engineering...and a lacking pipeline. 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴 𝘦𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘦 What happens when engineers write their own messaging? 𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘥 Go home on time, actual test results, and a cold beer waiting in the fridge. 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴 𝘦𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘦 Name three things every QA engineer dreams about on a Friday afternoon. 𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘴 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘦𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘥 "Our proprietary algorithmic methodology leverages advanced protocols to optimize test automation efficiency metrics..." 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴 𝘦𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘦 What's the fastest way to make sure nobody reads your website? Cheers, my enginerd friends...May your pipeline be fertile and your messages convert. #BOOMshockalocka 🤘👊💥😎

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For the tech companies building software. If you don’t iterate you will never get to Raptor 3. It’s easy to continually pile on to the first iteration… It’s easy to be a feature factory… Don’t be afraid to take the best and rip out all the failed experiments and/or features with no business value. #software #engineering #modular #contextbounding

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4 Things You Should Put in Your Daily Dev Log To harvest meaningful patterns from your dev log, you’ll need to capture the same things daily. I’ve been engineering software for 25 years, and I’ll share what I’ve routinely kept in mine. Your context is different, so your list will be also. Just make sure you capture the same things daily. Use this list as a skeleton to start from. It’s easier when you aren’t starting from a blank page! Pull Requests I keep track of every PR I submit, approve, or merge. Almost any work product I deliver or review flows through Git. My lists of PRs serve as a personal task-level kanban board of work in progress that I am connected to. These help me easily reconstruct a story of what I’ve done throughout the week. Personal Interactions I make note of every personal interaction I have, scheduled or otherwise. In addition to these notes, I keep a page for each person, and I link to that page from my daily notes. As I note patterns of interaction with a person, I’ll describe those patterns on their page. Over time I build a library of every person I’ve collaborated with and what we worked on together. Project Actions I keep a running narrative of the things I’m working on. I keep a section for each thing I’m working on. These might be at the product or story level - it just depends. Each time I hit a stopping point or interruption, I make a note of what I’ve been doing and what I plan to do next. Guess what I use to inform my daily standup updates? Perplexing Puzzles I make a note of everything that surprises me. These could be strange program behaviors, blockers, production issues - anything unexpected. As I review these periodically, I ask myself how I can use what I’ve learned to improve my mental models. Hopefully this list helps you get past the starting line. Do this faithfully for several months and see where it takes you!

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A few controversial things I believe about writing code: 1) Code should be comforting, not just functional. I’m not saying it should be flowery or overcomplicated. I’m just saying it should be easy to read and pleasant to navigate. 2) Comments should be personal. Contrary to popular belief, dry comments are a waste of time. “Initializes variable.” “Checks condition.” “Executes loop.” Generic comments are hard to remember and easily overlooked. 3) Humor belongs in your code. “Most people” keep their code dry and formal. Which leads to… Boring code. Disengaged devs. Missed opportunities for connection. Clearly, what “most people” do doesn’t work. So, add a little personality. 4) Consistent formatting isn’t negotiable. 99% of the time, neglecting formatting is a giant mistake. Instead, Robert Martin’s “Clean Code” framework offers a path to elegance without clutter. Consistent naming conventions. Proper indentation. Thoughtful use of whitespace. 5) Pursuing code efficiency at all costs is a silly goal. Because readability and maintainability often matter more. Code that’s easy to understand is a better pursuit in life. It saves time. It reduces errors. It fosters collaboration. If we all have to spend time there anyway, why not make it nice? In a world of deadlines and conflicting requirements, your code can be a refuge, a place of quiet contemplation. 🪷 Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog: https://lnkd.in/gjZbQJrP

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I’m not a 10x engineer. Not even close. Maybe above average on a good day. I've been around some great engineers throughout the years and I know there are levels to this craft. I'm a builder. I like making products. And complexity is one of the big problems that prevents developers like me from creating things normally. So I do everything in my power to reduce the complexity of my work. I write simple code so I can maintain it. I structure things so I don’t have to remember where they are. I follow principles so I have solutions to common problems. I've done a good job so far.

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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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I've seen a few posts lately saying things like "all code is a liability." It's pretty hard for me to accept that mentality, and it puts a super negative spin on the value developers bring. I'll be the first to support the idea that we're here to bring value, not to just write code for code's sake. But oftentimes the code is what delivers value, which makes it an asset. If you're building a SaaS, or an APaaS, or firmware for your hardware, your code is your most valuable asset. Without that code, you have no product. It makes me wonder - are there any other industries that would call their most valuable asset a liability? 🤔

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I think many people in the software industry make the mistake of viewing tech debt like a loan in deferral. They decide to add to their debt assuming there is no short term cost, but one day they will have to start paying it down (or declare bankruptcy with a huge rewrite). A more accurate analogy would compare your tech debt to credit card debt. You immediately start paying for this debt. The minimum payment would barely chip away at the interest accruing. You pay that cost in your project with every feature. The tech debt you add today makes the feature you add tomorrow more difficult. Every work item you take on without addressing the debt will be more difficult, and will likely add to the debt itself. With both analogies, a common end result is crippling debt that grinds your progress to a halt. However, the former analogy assumes that you are making quick progress, when that simply isn't the case. "The only way to go fast, is to go well." - Robert C. Martin

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"What's so special about that, I could build it in a weekend!" The dirty secret of most successful web apps is that the actual THING they do is a pretty small part of the codebase. Calculating payroll tax is tricky but not that hard. Turning that into a successful *business* means surrounding that with a TON of stuff that's utterly unrelated to the core business domain, but is absolutely necessary to support users, provide business info, make billing work, etc etc. #SaaS

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"The primary goal should be 'our developers write tests for any code that goes into production.' Anything less than that is an opportunity for those folks with a little less discipline or more anxiety about delivery times to backslide and abandon the primary goal of having tests for all your code. There are two major forces that lead applications towards not having any tests:  * The first is that it's hard to teach beginners in a language how to use testing tools; they are still just learning the language itself! * The second force is the work-culture pressure that says you don't have time to write tests." - Chris Hartjes #tdd #testdrivendevelopment #testing

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Code reviews are an essential part of making sure the team develops as a whole. Instead of just thinking about them as a way to catch errors, we should think about them as a way for everyone to grow as engineers. This means conducting them in a way that's conducive to learning rather than simply correcting. The goal isn't just to improve code quality, its to improve each other.

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Posts that ATTEMPT to classify Software Developers get it wrong ALL THE TIME. Here's why... There is no 'customer focused engineer' or '10x ninja'. There are only two types: 1. Developers with no side projects. 2. Developers with unfinished side projects.

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JetBrains has released their 2024 Developer Ecosystem Survey. If you haven't taken it yet, add your voice here: https://lnkd.in/gVJNSbqY I'm a HUGE fan of their products, having used JetBrains IntelliJ, Rider, ReSharper, PyCharm, AppCode, CLion, DataSpell and DataGrip at various points. I liked them so much, I bought my own personal license. As one colleague said, "They can have my IntelliJ license when they pry it from my cold, dead hands." I do more C# development these days, but still prefer Rider to VS + ReSharper.

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Potentially inflammatory statement: tech debt should be impossible. People usually squint at me when I say this. "Uh. Isn't tech debt a fact of life in software?" they ask. Sadly, it is. But it shouldn't be. Tech debt to me means "things that weren't done right and really should be fixed as soon as possible, ideally in the next sprint or two." Things that can wait for later--until we need the code to be more fancy--aren't tech debt, they're DECISIONS. The code isn't architected to handle 1,000 requests per second? That's not tech debt if for the next 6 months your product only needs to handle 10 requests per second. On the other hand, if we just slapped some code together and, "We'll come back later to write the unit tests," THAT is tech debt. Here's a simple rubric: 1. If you think, "We really should come back in the next sprint or two to fix this," you're about to incur tech debt. STOP and just fix it now. Why? Because you'll never have time to fix it later. (You think you will but trust me, you won't. Just ask your boss if they're OK with you making no progress for a sprint or two to fix "tech debt" because you didn't do it right in the first place.) 2. If you think, "This is good enough for now, and I won't really worry about this code for the next 6 months or so," Congrats! You didn't introduce tech debt. Software is never perfect and perfect software never ships. Build it right based on what you need NOW and refactor later when required. Make tech debt obsolete. Your CFO (and your customers) will love you for it. How do YOU avoid tech debt? Leave a comment and let me know.

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Is this valid TypeScript? Why or why not? I 💖 type safety. I recently gave an engineering talk on it at Stay AI and this line of code helps explains the differences between values and types in TypeScript quite succinctly.

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Want a better way to calculcate your cloud costs? When building cloud and connected products, we often get the question, "How much is this going to cost me?" It's a really good question, but traditional cost calculcators are often lacking. Our team at SpinDance tackled this problem by creating a custom Jupyter Notebook, powered by cloud pricing APIs. Michael Olson, one of our Principal Software Engineers, recently wrote up a blog post explaing the process. A link to the blog post is in the comments. 

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In simple words - testRigor is the #GenerativeAI #QA #software answer you've been waiting for. Free sign-up here: https://lnkd.in/dp9tAMRB

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Will Devin AI replace developers? 😱 Maybe 🤷🏻‍♂️ To me personally, Devin is a development tool and not a replacement...YET 🌚 I am not denying that Devin can code really well if all the claims are accurate. Eventually, it may replace developers. But developers don’t code just to code. We build products ✅ We build solutions ✅ And these happen to be made of code. Can companies ditch all developers today and expect products to still get built and maintained to the same standard as an enterprise-level solution? Nope 🙅🏻‍♂️ The quality of a product refers to how well it solves user problems. And those gaps between code, user, and solution? That’s where good developers provide values 👨🏻‍💻✨

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