Corporate empathy
Posted on December 23, 2023
| Diego J. Romero-López
Corporate empathy In this times of diversity based on gender, ethnical background, culture, etc. Is that enough? Do we have to be careful when talking with other coworker if they do not belong to any of the main categories? Can we say what we would like and in the way we would like? No, we need to treat them empthically.
Communication in the workplace When in every day job, we need to communicate with our coworkers.
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Rambos
Posted on December 16, 2023
| Diego J. Romero-López
Rambos A one-person army, alone, in the jungle of software, fighting against the peskiest, complex, and soul-eating bugs. He (or she) can work for hours, with a tenacity of a human-hunter machine coming from the future, and his value is sometimes considered 10 times the standard engineer. Your organization depends on this individual. You cross your fingers and pray to your deity to not make you loss this prolific, highly-valued and know-it-all individal contributor.
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What is your constraint? Mine is anti-work
Posted on November 24, 2023
| Diego J. Romero-López
What is your constraint? Mine is anti-work We, as engineers, not only are worried about creating new things, we need to be able to detect the cause of future issues. However, we must not limit ourselves to software, but to the entire software development team organization.
How it all started: The Phoenix Project I was reading the other day the book “The Phoenix Project”, and while the book is a good read, I was geting bored.
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Don't touch that
Posted on October 12, 2023
| Diego J. Romero-López
Don’t touch that Have you ever been told “don’t touch that, if you modify that piece of code you are going to break anything”? How did you react to this comment? Did you feel “attacked” or simply ignored that piece of advice?
Code jungle Starting a working on a project that has some dark corners is a daunting task but following some guidelines can be useful.
Scary code There is always some scary code, I do not mean code that is difficult to understand, but code that has unintended consequences if modified.
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Misconceptions about code comments
Posted on September 2, 2023
| Diego J. Romero-López
Misconceptions about code comments I have been working in this industry since 2008, and it seems an idea is spreading through software companies: code comments are considered harmful. Is that true?
Where did all start? I think that this idea started with the Clean Code book and the subsequent talks by Robert C. Martin.
Uncle Bob (as people use to call him), has the idea that code should be self-explanatory, and if there is a comment, it is because code is not well structured.
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How to manage docker secrets
Posted on August 12, 2023
| Diego J. Romero-López
How to manage docker secrets The product that is produced by most software developer teams is a docker image. How can be sure that we are not leaking secrets in docker images? If we include them as building arguments for sure they are going to be stored in the own image. Is there any way to avoid having them inside the docker image?
Introduction Suppose you have a docker image that requires a secret, you do not want to include it in the image, but you need during the process of building the image.
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Software engineer, programmer or wizard
Posted on June 11, 2023
| Diego J. Romero-López
Software engineer, programmer or wizard Introduction I have been named many things (with respect to my profession) some of them were not actually correct. Should I correct people? Should I be worried about this?
Naming They say that naming something creates it. Does being called a Software Engineer increases our work level? Does it give more respect profession-wise?
As our discipline evolves, we have had many names from programmers, to software developers, software engineers, or even wizards!
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Code reviews or understanding the code
Posted on May 2, 2023
| Diego J. Romero-López
Code reviews or understanding the code How would you do a code review? Only by reading the code changes or do you thing you need to actually run the code, and what is more important, fully understand the modifications?
A tale of two code review cultures Let’s compare the two following environments:
Slow but safe team Imagine a team were reviews are done by several members. There is a focus on the detail, PRs are slow to be merged as they are improved several times before the final merge.
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Don't work more than enough
Posted on May 1, 2023
| Diego J. Romero-López
Don’t work more than enough Sometimes we push ourselves to the max. maybe because it is there are some deadlines when we are not going to be able to release the new version, maybe it is because our life outside work is not good enough or maybe because we are excited to be working in such a company/technology/team.
However, our mental health is going to be damaged by overworking. The question is not how much, but when we are going to get burned out by overworking.
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Bike sheding in merge reviews
Posted on April 26, 2023
| Diego J. Romero-López
Bike sheding in merge reviews Focusing on the important things is a crucial matter. When trying to solve a problem, sometimes we subconsciously focus on the easy part, the known part, the part we know we can tackle, and forget about the other parts. The hard parts.
Prelude Humans are falible, we know that we are not as rational, impartial and intelligent as we like. We are full of flaws.
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