Enforcing standards in a distributed system might impose the risk of constraining innovation but it can help preserving everyone’s sanity. The importance of standards Microservice architectures can quickly evolve into an integration nightmare and a fractured ecosystem if standards are not taken seriously. …

Your current software running in production might be considered legacy today, but it has managed to achieve something remarkable: it solved the problems it was created for. As technologies evolve it gets harder and harder for software to survive the test of time. With exponential progress, software tends to start…

Your GitHub profile can increase the chances of landing your next programming job, but it can also act as a double-edged sword. The résumé filtering challenge Some companies rely on GitHub profiles when evaluating software engineers and dismiss candidates that don’t have one. …

Are you considering a career in software development? Or are you currently struggling to keep up? Achieving your goals is both easier and harder than you think. I recently participated in a coding dojo as a teacher and I was really surprised to see how some of the participants, most…

Individual code ownership or collective code ownership? Your choice won’t really matter if you are missing one critical ingredient: the developers need to care. Empowerment and the risk of unilateral decisions From the management point of view, it makes a lot of sense for a larger company not to allow an individual developer to completely own a…

I absolutely love functional programming. It does help in a lot of ways, but you should keep in mind that you can still end up with a written program that is completely, utterly, broken. Avoiding mutable state Functional programming will help you avoid most of the errors caused by having an unmanageable amount…

Why do businesses grow technology teams to the extreme? The Mythical Man Month taught us that throwing people at a problem won’t help to deliver software products faster. But in some cases, it still feels necessary. Team Size != Productivity This has been crystal clear for quite some time. Smaller teams usually have a…

This is going to be a tough topic. It’s a very powerful dilemma in modern software engineering. It’s complicated because it also reflects our everyday lives. We all live in a world where there’s no absolute freedom and a government is considered vital by most people. …

This is our story. For some of us, those with 10 or more years of experience in software, it might sound familiar. For the others, still in the early stages of their careers, there should be plenty of advice about what’s coming up next in your short-to-medium-term future. The early stages We are…