Technical debt occurs when we knowingly or unknowingly make a decision that will require parts of our system to be reworked later. Maybe we write some messy code in the interest of rapid prototyping and iteration, or maybe we avoid updating a library because it introduces changes that will require a lot of refactoring. We […]

Software development is a mentally challenging activity. Recently, I was thinking about this when I came across a psychology theory called cognitive load.

Dealing with undefined or null values is an issue that can range from being a mild inconvenience to a giant source of bugs and regret. Today, I’m going to talk about a relatively elegant way to deal with undefined and null values: the Maybe monad. Goals My plan with this post is to avoid the […]

In any moderately complex application, there comes a time for major upgrades. These upgrades are often deprioritized until some business case knocks on your door to make the update more urgent, which can raise insanity levels and make jumping this hurdle seem insurmountable. After having gone through this process several times on various projects, I […]

Code reviews are becoming more and more essential to the software development process. The days of cowboy coders building software alone in private offices with no collaboration or oversight are mostly gone. Instead, we’ve realized the value of building things with others who can point out hazards in our blind spots and spur us to […]