When Code Is Cheap, Does Quality Still Matter?
The other day we were having a casual conversation on quality and looking at a few code examples. If you want serious engineering, you want your code to use a few principles lik...
Articles tagged with Technical Debt
Technical debt writing on maintenance cost, software decay, short-term shortcuts, and the long tail of past engineering decisions.
The Mirror Is Part of the Machine
The most fun telemetry problems I've seen usually start with an incident where we could not see enough, so we added the missing field after the postmortem. Then that justincase...
Capacity Is the Roadmap
When I was young, I worked in carpentry during the summers. Summer was busy. New buildings had to go up. Stables needed repairs. Barns needed extensions. Sheds had to be built o...
Most of What We Call Progress
Most of what we call progress in software is just motion. New tools, new frameworks, same problems. Maybe fancier logos. Our industry always has this collective thrill that a ne...
Stop Wasting Brainpower
How many times have you found yourself saying: “I worked all day, but I didn’t get anything done.” I know, we have all been there. We feel bad about it, too. On the surface, it...
Why Over-Engineering Happens
If you’ve worked in software long enough, you’ve probably seen it: a CRUD app serving a handful of users, deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with half the CNCF landscape stitched...
Engineering Health Essentials
Engineering health is a term that deserves far more attention than it receives. Sustainable software development is not only about the features we ship or the speed at which we...
Cracking Coding Bottlenecks
In software development, we obsess over component benchmarks and algorithmic complexity, chasing milliseconds latency and BigO wins. But, time and after time, I’ve found that th...
Why Legacy Systems Are Worth Your Time
I know. When you hear legacy, you think , , weird edge cases, and “what the hell just broke now.” Every moment feels frustrating. You don’t know what the next change will trigge...
Why Metrics Don’t Equal Quality
In 1902, Hanoi was drowning in rats. The government was getting nervous about plague. Hence, the city put a bounty per rat tail. Suddenly, the system had a scoreboard, something...
Addressing Technical Debt
A field needs to be added, a rule needs to change, or a customer bug needs a quick fix, and on paper the work looks small enough to finish in a day. Then someone points out that...
Building a Technical Vision
A technical vision is the compass of an engineering organization. It sets the longterm direction. I believe it should define the "why" and "where" behind the technical choices t...
On Writing Wrapper Libraries
A wrapper library is a thin layer of abstraction around an existing library, dependency, or functionality. A wrapper library offers a better and cleaner interface or rather hide...
What's wrong with Agile Frameworks
Some time ago, I attended a course and became . It wasn’t a huge deal. I was already doing the job. But as time went on and I gained more experience, my view of agile frameworks...
Hype in Software Development
We live in a time when every month brings a new framework, library, or architectural pattern that promises to change everything. Increasingly often, we come across a new technol...
Why I like JavaScript
Every programming language has its oddities and challenges. When it comes to JavaScript, it has Every programming language has its oddities and challenges. When it comes to Java...
Refactoring Untested Code
Most teams realize they are dealing with a legacy repo only when a tiny change turns into an operation. A oneline fix suddenly needs three people, two days of manual checks, and...
You Cannot Fix What You Cannot See
I have been working on this data discovery tool for a while, and it keeps showing me how messy our systems really are. The idea behind it is simple. Crawl every database we have...
Buggy Code on Production, Survived
Areca is the name of the billing engine I am working on for Turk Telekom. Funny enough, it is also the name of the flowers we bought to freshen the office. We wanted the office...