Recently MicKinsey came out with an article titled “Yes, you can measure software developer productivity”. After so much research by so many in software development including some of the biggest players such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. McKinsey has come in and solved it for us. I of course am…

Modern software development spends the vast majority of its time at an extremely abstract level. Gone are the days of the majority of developers having to worry about registers, manual memory management, and pointers. This has undoubtedly led to an improved velocity of the creation of software. We can now…

Often when embarking on the implementation of a new piece of functionality or a new product entirely a common first step is to build a proof of concept (POC). Proof of concepts are a valuable tool in software development and provide various benefits. These benefits include the ability to test…

To me, one of the allures of software development is what Fred Brooks famously labeled as working “only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. [Software developers] build [their] castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.” This starting from nothing and building up something of value is…

A common issue that is experienced in software development is the disconnect between how the software is described as working and how it works in reality. This often can be caused by a well-meaning developer coming before you and either misunderstanding how the system works and documenting that misunderstanding as…

As technologists, we spend much of our time learning the latest technologies, development practices, and tools. These are very important to the work that we do and thus we rightfully give them a lot of our attention. There are many resources from which to learn this information whether they be…

Software architecture can be a hard thing to pin down. While at times architecture may feel intimidating, anyone writing any code is participating in software architecture. From simple scripts to sprawling distributed systems there is always a software architecture whether planned or not. While every person that writes code participates…

One of the commonly used techniques used by popular Java frameworks and libraries is object proxies. Even though it is a popular pattern used in many of the libraries that developers use daily, many developers have never directly built a Java proxy in their own code. …

In a recent project I worked on DynamoDB was used as the data store. The project was an internal utility that would get spiky utilization. It would go from zero traffic to a non-insignificant amount of usage in a short time. …