Articles
Software engineering lessons from production, raw and honest from the heart — almost 20 years of them. Jump to a year in the sidebar, or browse categories and curated collections.
7 articles from April 2022 · show all
Bad excuses to want a rewrite
Here's a sneak peek at a new book I'm writing about Refactoring and Rewriting. It's with a publisher so I might get in trouble for sharing this, but it's a first draft ... they own the final version 😛
The role of a senior+ engineer
"Every product org should have a senior+ engineer whose job it is to run around and make everyone else more productive" 🤔 That IS the role of a senior+ engineer
Quick tip about JavaScript's optional chaining operator
People on twitter loved this trick I learned from a coworker's pull request the other day. You might like it too.
Code Review Practices for Refactoring Changes
Do you review refactoring pull requests differently than you do others? An empirical study of OpenStack, an open source cloud platform, says that you do and finds 6 common criteria.
How we made the best burndown chart you've ever seen
My entire career I've never seen a sprint finished on time. The new manager said "Oh I think we can fix that" ... 18 months later he proved me wrong
When to join and leave a company, project, or trend
Timing changes everything. Who do you think has better engineers? The team that built Google from 9 million daily searches in 2000 to 1 billion in 2009, or the team that launched Google's 10th chat app last year?
Promise.allSettled, a wonderful tool for resilient code
The pros and cons of different approaches to writing resilient code that handles partial failures