What are some ways we can use GenAI to make developers' lives easier? A couple of years ago I had the chance to use GenAI to help build out a natural-language-to-query-language translator in a software observability system. This capability allowed users to ask a plain-English question such as "What are my slowest …

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Over the course of your career you will hear about many design patterns. From higher-level design patterns like model-view-controller and model-view-presenter to implementation patterns such as observer, singleton, and adapter pattern. These patterns are valuable to establish a consistent design / architecture and …

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Spend less time waiting for your build to run and more time developing software by enhancing your Gradle build with caching and parallel execution. The fastest part of your build is one you don't even need to run at all. And then run the necessary parts of your build in parallel.

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Recently I came across a Reddit post where the author wanted to know if their on-call situation was standard or if it was out of the ordinary. The post describes a tire fire, not a production-ready software system: "Is it normal to get alerted multiple times each and every hour of oncall, and then expected to go …

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As you've likely seen, ChatGPT is getting a lot of attention lately. I wanted to experiment with it and see what I could learn, so this past weekend I tried out integrating ChatGPT into one of my apps. What was it like to work with and what could I potentially get from it? This is a recounting of my experiment. A while …

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Why can't you just add this new feature or fix that lingering bug? After all, it's the time and effort for that change alone - right? But it's not just the cost of what work you choose to tackle - you're also paying the price for all the other work you didn't implement instead. That's the opportunity cost. Opportunity …

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Over the past 15 years I've reviewed hundreds upon hundreds of pull requests. From pull requests against projects I built and maintain to PRs submitted as promotion portfolio reviews in projects I've never seen or worked on, and everything in between. Over time I've developed a set of four key items I look for in each …

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As you move along in your software engineering career, one of the biggest ways you can have a larger impact is to be a force multiplier. What does it mean to be a force multiplier, you might ask? Having an outsized impact on others beyond your direct contributions. For example, helping level-up the skills of other …

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Software engineering teams are a critical component of many companies, where the effectiveness of these teams can have a significant impact on the company's success. Making investments in areas such as these in improving developer productivity will pay off significantly, giving development teams more time to focus on …

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We've all seen it, code comments that are so obvious they add nothing but noise to the codebase. Redundant comments restating exactly what operation the code is performing. For example, this function's purpose is obvious from its name - adding a comment as well doesn't add any value: 1// Verifies if the auth token is …

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