Because abstractions aren’t free, sometimes we’re better off duplicating code instead of creating them. If that claim doesn’t make sense to you, read Martin Fowler’s “YAGNI” or Sandi Metz’s “The Wrong Abstraction” or watch Dan Abramov’s “WET Code” talk or Kent C. Dodd’s “AHA Programming” talk. Each of these programmers…

Good programmers are good at forecasting. They can often predict roughly how long it’ll take to accomplish a particular programming task. They can also predict when and to what extent a project will see ROI from a particular technical investment. Unfortunately, this skill isn’t guaranteed to develop as we gain…

When programming, always follow the camping rule: Always leave the code base healthier than when you found it. - Martin Fowler, Refactoring The Boy Scouts of America have a simple rule that we can apply to our profession. Leave the campground cleaner than you found it. - Robert Martin, Clean…

In my experience, most applications are a mess…Changes are commonly made under urgent time pressure, which drives applications towards disorder…Velocity gradually slows, and everyone comes to hate the application, their job, and their life. -Sandi Metz, “The Half-Life of Code” Why Many of us work in codebases that are not easy…

I wrapped up my job search recently, and I’m happy to say that I’ll be joining a YC-backed startup called “Heap.” I thought I’d share a little bit about my job search in case the information may benefit other job-seeking devs. I’ll go over the pipeline of places I applied…

Some thoughts on the cost of automated testing — Testing seems to be like going to gym. Everyone feels like “yeah. I should be testing. I should be going to the gym everyday.” Koushik Goupal, Fragmented, “Episode 13,” 12:01 Remember those gimmicky fitness products that made you think you could “get fit” without actually going to the gym/dieting/etc? Because…

An open learning exercise — Introduction Gradient descent is an algorithm that’s used to solve supervised learning and deep learning problems. Here I’m going to try to give you an idea of why the algorithm works and how you’d implement it in Kotlin. …

Dagger adoption frustrations and how I’d do it differently next time — …in software, feedback cycles tend to be on the order of months, if not years…It’s during the full lifetime of a project that a developer gains experience writing code, source controlling it, modifying it, testing it, and living with previous design and architecture decisions during maintenance phases. …

I recently delivered a presentation of our (outcome-based) roadmap. Several people approached me after the presentation to tell me that they found it useful and informative, so I thought I’d jot down some of the things that I think contributed to the warm reception of the presentation. …