Eduard Sizov blogging about programming, career, soft skills for experienced developers; at least one new post every month.
You only start to appreciate boring tools when you run your software in production. It’s hard to choose tools nowadays because there are so many of them, and marketing departments work hard to sell you the magic by pushing the right buttons: “infinite scale”, “cloud-native”, “edge-ready”… But marketing teams don’t run the software. Engineers do. In prod, all marketing slogans lose their spell…
Imagine you are a technician. Someone hired you to repair a locked safe box for a fixed price of 100$. You agreed. You open a safe and see 1,000,000$ in it. A person who hired you is wealthy. A poor logic that burned some people I know is the following: The safe holds 1,000,000$. You opened it for 100$. It’s only 0.01% of the wealth it holds. “I work for *nothing* compared to how valuable the safe…
A story from experience: Many years ago, I was leading tech efforts in one international organization. We were using Scrum and 2-week iterations. Everything went well, we were conquering the market, and our customers were happy with our 2-week delivery cycle. It was 2010 – a year a fantastic book about Continuous Delivery was published:
Over the years of working with many teams, I’ve done tech retros (biweekly) and found them helpful. It’s like a sprint retrospective but focused primarily on technical debt and code issues. Here’s how it works: We create a Trello board to which engineers add stickies with architecture/design/code parts that slow them down or make them frustrated. At the tech retro we: Review, clean, and prioritize…
What is easy to use is hard to reuse. What is easy to reuse is hard to use. This phenomenon is called the use/reuse paradox: As we try to make code more reusable (more generic, more abstract, more customizable), we make it more difficult to use. Such code/module/library needs to be tailored to our context and the context of every individual consumer. Moreover, the API of a highly reusable module…
Many engineers see interviewing others as a waste of time, especially when an interview doesn’t result in a hire. My advice: Use interviews to boost your professional reputation and grow your network. Every ~30-60 minutes spent with a person should add 1x person to your personal fan club. And because people talk to each other, each fan will bring N more. The compound effect in action. When people…
“Keep it simple, stupid” is a good advice. It’s also an obvious one because, when solving problems, nobody is thinking: “How do I make things more complex than necessary?”. Engineers generally try to keep things simple. Yet, over-engineering is found on every corner, and we keep reminding our colleagues to KISS. So why is it so hard to follow KISS advice? 🤔 KISS often means one of the following:…
The more impactful your role is, the more social proof your customer(s) will need before they agree to work with you. At some point in your career, your ability to get a great job/offer/contract will depend more on what your ex-customers and colleagues say about your work, performance, ethics. Not what you say. As I write this, I have three unanswered messages on my LinkedIn. These are requests…
The beauty of solopreneurship is that you can play with different technologies. There are so many things you’ve always wanted to try! It’s just a dream to play with tech while having no one to report to. No need to convince rugged seniors and top management that your ideas are worth it. Just do what your heart wants. Dreams quickly dissipate when you realize that, unlike employment, the number of…
I constantly meet interviewers wondering why so many programmers, including experienced ones, fail even the simplest coding tests. But it’s not programmers that fail the tests. It’s tests fail programmers. This is how it usually happens: Welcome to our technical interview! As part of our assessment process, we give candidates a stupid simple coding test. Here it is. (hands you a sheet of paper).…