In the last two years, I’ve worked on a few projects passed on to me by other teams. Inheriting an existing codebase can be a challenge, given you weren’t there when architectural decisions were made, you are less familiar with the project domain and client needs, and you are just new to the codebase. In […]

When you need to add a major bit of functionality to your system, what’s the first thing you do? Naturally, you start looking through whatever package repository is appropriate for a solution that fits. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it’s important to think of the trade-offs made by adding external dependencies.

Every project eventually hits a point where a big change needs to be made, and it’s going to break everything. And you’re going to be the one stuck putting it back together. Whether it’s a language or tool change that causes your application to no longer compile, a third-party SaaS service change that breaks features […]