Software Engineering and articles

Advice for a Developer Just Starting Out

Advice for growing as a developer: keep learning, explore diverse projects, write and test lots of code, and cultivate both technical skills and a strong professional attitude.

Counterintuitive Ideas in Software Development

Nine ideas about simplicity, design, testing, optimization, and incremental improvement that challenge common assumptions and help us build more maintainable software.

The Black Book of the Programmer Is Now Available

The English edition of The Programmer's Black Book brings its reflections on quality, organization, testing, and refactoring to developers around the world.

Why Software Becomes Corrupted

Unclear requirements, chaotic changes, insufficient testing, and a lack of refactoring can make an application increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain.

What Is Software Quality?

Software quality is about more than meeting requirements: it also means code that is simple, readable, consistent, testable, and easy to maintain and evolve.

15 Years of... Repeated Experience

Fifteen years in a profession don't guarantee fifteen years of varied experience: learning across different projects broadens perspective and helps prevent professional stagnation.

Continuous Refinement

Continuously refining software through small improvements to its design, code, tests, and deployment makes it easier to maintain and reduces the effort needed to add new features.

DigitalOcean

Why I keep using DigitalOcean for personal projects and Drupal websites: developer-friendly simplicity, affordable Droplets, monitoring, an API, and excellent documentation.

A Productivity Test for Development Teams

78 questions to assess a development team's discipline, practices, work environment, and organization, and identify improvements for building quality, maintainable software.

Redis as a Database

Why Redis can be a suitable database for Picly.io: simple data structures, performance, ease of operation, and a Node.js library that abstracts its commands.

Picly: From Idea to Business

From the first prototype to the commercial beta: the technical work and business processes required to launch and maintain Picly, an image server with on-the-fly transformations.

What Doodle, Etsy, and Cloudinary Have in Common

Doodle, Etsy, and Cloudinary show that behind an apparently simple digital service are multidisciplinary teams and substantial technical and organizational infrastructure.