software engineering

May 16, 2021 software engineering

Timely computation of derived values

In my penultimate post, I described the use-case of an e-commerce shop. In general, interactions in such a shop are the following: You can browse a catalog of itemsEach item has a price tagYou can put x items in your cart It’s when the exciting part starts. On most pages, you want to give users a condensed view of their cart’s state. Here are a couple of options for the state’s view: Empty/non-emptyNumber of cart linesNumber of itemsTotal cost. In demos, it’s as sim

Sep 4, 2016 technical debt refactoring software engineering

Limits of the technical debt analogy

The triangle of project management is a well-known model, used through and through since ages. I assume most software developers, even junior ones, are familiar with those: TimeCostScope As for my personal experience in the software industry, all projects have been behind schedule, with only a few exceptions for small projects (some man-months). The reason might probably because initial estimations were too low, either by accident or on purpose, but that is a subject best tackled in anothe

Aug 7, 2016 performance software engineering

Performance cost of reflection

In Java, it’s widely admitted that reflection - usage of the java.reflect API, comes at a high cost in terms of performance. Older Java versions had huge performance overhead, while it seems that newer versions bring it in the acceptable range. But what does 'acceptable' really mean? This is the question I asked when commenting on a performance review that advised to replace code based on reflection by standard code.

Jul 31, 2016 refactoring software engineering

You don't talk about refactoring club

The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. I guess the same could be said about refactoring. That would first requires to define what I mean by refactoring in the context of this post.

Apr 6, 2015 software engineering versioning

What's the version of my deployed application?

In my career, I’ve noticed many small and un-expensive features that didn’t find their way into the Sprint backlog because they didn’t provide business value. However, they provided plenty of Return Over Investment during the life of the application, but that was completely overlooked due to short-sighted objectives (set by short-sighted management). Those include, but are not limited to: Monitoring in general, and more specifically metrics, health checks, etc. Environment data