Laid off, No one is coming to save you
Feb 12, 2025
3 min read
You’ve been laid off and no one is coming to your rescue. You might’ve not liked your job before but you at least knew how to wake up and plant your oats. Now you have an infinite amount of time, and no one talks about how difficult this is. So you wake up and do what you know how to do. You pop up open your personal laptop and start browsing the job boards for your future. The possibilities are endless. You feel a rush of hope at what could be. You are now a master of your own destiny, you WILL dictate what you want to do every day and how much to be paid for it.
You apply to a few, half dozen jobs and go on about the rest of your day.
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➦ Writing code in the spirit of Ubuntu for the friends
Feb 10, 2025
in •
UBUNTU
zulu
ubuntu
code
moment
quality
person
3 min read
Very often we program in isolation, and our programs reflect both our personal interpretation of the problem and a very personal solution to it. We can work in a team, but even then we are isolated as a team. We easily forget that the code created in such isolation will be executed, used, and extended by other people. It’s easy to overlook the social aspect of programming. Creating software is both a technical and a social endeavor. We should look around more often to understand that we do not work in isolation and that we share a common responsibility for the potential success not only of the group of developers but also of every person around us.
It is possible to write high-quality code in isolation from reality, completely detached.
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➦ You need to take care of the code
Feb 04, 2025
sherlock holmes
enjoy
code
programmers
work
programmer
programming
3 min read
You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to understand that good programmers write good code. Well, the bad ones don’t. They create ugly things that everyone else has to clean up. But you want to write good code, right? Then you need to strive to become a good programmer.
Good code doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Its emergence is not caused by the favorable alignment of the planets. To make the code good, you need to work on it, and quite a bit. You will create good code only when you truly strive for it. Good programming is not the result of mere technical competence. I have encountered very smart programmers who are capable of creating strong and impressive algorithms, know the standards of their language perfectly, and yet write completely terrible code.
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➦ Perspective as seen from 300 meters
Feb 02, 2025
whenever
view
infoviz
code
quality
representations
metrics
program
software
3 min read
We architects are interested in learning how good the software we are developing is.There is a more subtle internal component to program quality that has to do with the design’s clarity, or how simple it is for us to comprehend, support, and grow the software product. The exterior component of program quality is evident: the program must be valuable to the user. Whenever we push for a definition of quality, we ultimately say, “I’ll know when I see it.” So, what do you think quality is?
Architectural charts use small squares to represent entire systems, and the lines that connect them can indicate any number of things, including shared resources (like a train) or dependencies. These diagrams show the system at a 10-kilometer altitude, which is roughly equivalent to how an airplane views the terrain.
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➦ The importance of code formatting
Jan 22, 2025
in •
COBOL
cobol
code
first
kevin mcguire
line
screen
work
poetry
3 min read
In ancient times, I worked on a COBOL project where all participants were forbidden to change the indentation size unless it was necessary to modify the code. All because one day someone broke something – a line of code crept onto the next one and ended up in special columns at the beginning of the line. The ban was in effect even if the code formatting was misleading—which happened—so one had to read the code very carefully, as it couldn’t be trusted. I’m sure the losses from this policy were enormous because it slowed down the work of programmers.
Researchers have shown that a programmer spends more time navigating and reading code (to find the part that needs to be changed) than actually writing code, so it is advisable to optimize these operations.
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➦ Incredible, but testers are your friends
Jan 18, 2025
in •
CANADA
canada
whenever
got
program
issues
testers
intelligence
fix
3 min read
They may call themselves quality control or quality assurance, but many programmers simply call them a nuisance. My experience shows that programmers often have a hostile relationship with those who test their programs. “They’re too picky” or “They want everything to be perfect” are common complaints. Sound familiar?
I don’t know why, but I have always had a different view on the work of testers. Maybe it’s because the “tester” at my first job in Canada was the firm’s secretary. A very pleasant lady who handled paperwork and tried to teach a couple of young programmers professional behavior in the presence of clients. She also had the gift of spotting any program defect, even the most inconspicuous, in a matter of seconds.
At that time, I was working on a program written by an accountant who considered herself a programmer.
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➦ Thinking about performance is never too early
Jan 18, 2025
first
performance
system
testing
requirements
issues
3 min read
The needs of business application users manifest primarily in the functional requirements. Non-functional aspects of the system (such as performance, flexibility, uptime, support needs, etc.) are the responsibility of the architect. When this preliminary testing of non-functional requirements is often postponed until a very late stage of the development cycle, and sometimes fully delegated to the team servicing the system.
This error occurs much more often than it should. At its core, it can there are various reasons. Concern for the speed and flexibility of a program that still doesn’t properly perform the required function may seem pointless. The test environments and the tests themselves are quite complex. It’s possible that early working versions of the system won’t be subjected to realistic loads. due to insufficient use.
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➦ Take responsibility for your build and its refactoring
Jan 16, 2025
code
study
process
assembly
scripts
application
3 min read
It is not so rare for teams, which generally discipline themselves to follow good coding practices, to treat build scripts with disdain. They are considered either insignificant or so complex that only a sect of release engineers can maintain them. If build scripts are difficult to maintain, contain duplication and errors, it leads to problems of the same scale as poorly designed code.
Why do responsible and competent developers consider project assembly to be a somewhat secondary task? One explanation is that assembly scripts are often written in a different language than the source code. Another is that assembly scripts are not considered “code.” Such explanations are contradictory, as most developers are eager to learn new languages, and it is the assembly process that produces executable modules which developers and end users will test and run.
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➦ Why I rejected a Big4 offer again
Jan 16, 2025
3 min read
In April I was approached by a Big4 recruiter again. I currently do not work at the consultancy firm, and I was not looking for a new job, but the internal recruiter was so pleasant that I said yes. After 4 interviews in 3 months, I rejected them, and this is my experience.
First (pre-)interview
The first interview was with the recruiter, and it was pleasant. The recruiter was interested in me and my experience and told me about the BIG4 culture and work. It matched my values and what I enjoy doing.
Second interview
The second interview was with a director and a partner. It was one-sided; they were not interested in me, but only in what I bring to the table. I am Russian, and it is custom here to start an interview with introducing yourself and talking about yourself, such as sharing your industry sense, professional goals and passions.
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➦ Apply the principles of functional programming
Jan 14, 2025
programming
transparency
paradigm
objects
functions
3 min read
Functional programming has recently regained the attention of the majority in the programming community, partly because the emergent properties of the functional paradigm resonate with solving the challenges arising in our industry due to the increasing importance of multi-core architectures. And although this application is undoubtedly important, it is not the main reason for my urging to learn functional programming.
By mastering the functional programming paradigm, a programmer can significantly improve the quality of code produced in other contexts. A deep understanding of the functional programming paradigm and its practical application will help you design systems with a much higher degree of referential transparency.
Referential transparency is a highly desirable quality: it implies that functions consistently produce the same results for the same input data regardless of the place and time of calling these functions.
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