“What the hell was I thinking?!?” It’s 1:30AM and I am staring at a piece of code I wrote no more than a month ago. At the time it seemed like a work of art. It all made sense. It was elegant and simple and amazing. Not anymore. I have...

Generative AI has seized the popular imagination and started a new tech gold rush. While much attention has been focused on AI tools that produce natural language prose and visual art, in tech circles AI is gaining increased interest for its coding capabilities. You can describe a program you want...

Understanding is key to building quality software. Here are 3 levels of understanding we should go through before we start coding. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had the position of a team lead/manager/dev lead, call this what you want, but I’m essentially in charge of a module as...

  While sometimes there’s nothing to do but crack open that energy drink and grind out an all-nighter, coders tend to work smarter, not harder by finding ways to increase their productivity without sacrificing work quality. No matter what specific industry you work in or which programming language you’ve specialized...

Key strategic and tactical considerations to take when building a new product with the domain-driven design concepts in mind I have just finished reading Learning Domain-Driven Design by Vlad Khononov. It’s quite a short book (c. 300 pages) aiming to teach beginners all about domain-driven design. I wanted to check...

As a developer, which areas should we focus on for performance optimizations? How can we measure the impact? Read this post to learn the framework. Performance optimization is any software or hardware modifications that make the platform faster and more scalable, improving latency or throughput or both. You can spend...

Passion is both the reason and the reward I entered the software industry about 2 decades ago. I was an engineering graduate, but I didn’t have a computer degree. It was OK, not only because I knew the basics of software making (I was an Electronics engineer), but also because...

Also known as Pseudo-Analysis and Blind Development, Mushroom Management is often described by this phrase: "Keep your developers in the dark and feed them fertilizer." An experienced system architect recently stated, "Never let software developers talk to end users." Furthermore, without end-user participation, "The risk is that you end up...

Background Cut-and-Paste Programming is a very common, but degenerate form of software reuse which creates maintenance nightmares. It comes from the notion that it's easier to modify existing software than program from scratch. This is usually true and represents good software instincts. However, the technique can be easily over used....

AntiPattern Problem Using today's software technology is analogous to walking through a high-technology mine field. This mini-AntiPattern is also known as Nothing Works or Do You Believe in Magic? Numerous bugs occur in released software products; in fact, experts estimate that original source code contains two to five bugs per...

AntiPattern Problem Software that fails straightforward behavioral tests may be an example of an Input Kludge, which occurs when ad hoc algorithms are employed for handling program input. For example, if the program accepts free text input from the user, an ad hoc algorithm will mishandle many combinations of legal...

Background The Spaghetti Code AntiPattern is the classic and most famous AntiPattern; it has existed in one form or another since the invention of programming languages. Nonobject-oriented languages appear to be more susceptible to this AntiPattern, but it is fairly common among developers who have yet to fully master the...

AntiPattern Problem A Dead End is reached by modifying a reusable component, if the modified component is no longer maintained and supported by the supplier. When these modifications are made, the support burden transfers to the application system developers and maintainers. Improvements in the reusable component cannot be easily integrated,...

Background This is one of the most common AntiPatterns in the industry. Frequently, a vendor, specifically a database vendor, will advocate using its growing product suite as a solution to most of the needs of an organization. Given the initial expense of adopting a specific database solution, such a vendor...

AntiPattern Problem A Boat Anchor is a piece of software or hardware that serves no useful purpose on the current project. Often, the Boat Anchor is a costly acquisition, which makes the purchase even more ironic. The reasons for acquiring a Boat Anchor are usually compelling at the time. For...

Background When Michael Akroyd presented the Gypsy AntiPattern at Object World West in 1996, he likened the transient appearance and then discrete vanishing of the gypsy class to a "Gypsy Wagon" that is there one day and gone the next. As we studied Akroyd's model, we wanted to convey more...

Background Functional Decomposition is good in a procedural programming environment. It's even useful for understanding the modular nature of a larger-scale application. Unfortunately, it doesn't translate directly into a class hierarchy, and this is where the problem begins. In defining this AntiPattern, the authors started with Michael Akroyd's original thoughts...

AntiPattern Problem Object-oriented analysis and design (OOA&D) models are often presented without clarifying the viewpoint represented by the model. By default, OOA&D models denote an implementation viewpoint that is potentially the least useful. Mixed viewpoints don't allow the fundamental separation of interfaces from implementation details, which are one of the...

Background In a data-mining expedition, we began looking for insight into developing a standard interface for a particular kind of system. The system we were mining was very similar to those we hoped would eventually support the standard we were working on. It was also a research-originated system and highly...

AntiPattern Problem Technology is changing so rapidly that developers have trouble keeping up with the current versions of software and finding combinations of product releases that work together. Given that every commercial product line evolves through new product releases, the situation has become increasingly difficult for developers to cope with....