What’s the log statement really for? Why should you bother? — If you’ve done any programming you’ve probably come across a ‘log’ statement. You might have used it as a debugging aid; to make your code spit out some information at a problematic point. But is this what they’re really for? …

A desperate plea from a humble software engineer Doing Pull Request reviews is an essential part of being a programmer working as a part of a team. Giving reviews promptly helps the teamwork quickly and giving reviews well helps keep the quality of the code-base high. However, I’d be lying…

What’s the distinction between these three categories of cloud resources? You may have heard these three terms in reference to various cloud products on the market. This article should demystify the differences between the three categories and help you identify the use cases for…

How did Authentication and Authorization evolve into the technologies we use today? — Authentication and Authorization are key to the modern internet. Most of the services we use online require having some form of a profile. We want our credentials to be secure, but we don’t want to remember 100 passwords. Furthermore, we increasingly want services to do things on our behalf. …

A quick summary of a variety of historical and modern Software Architectural styles. — Every software project is different, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t trends we can pick out. Big Ball of Mud The is the architecture you end up with when you don’t pick an architecture. ‘Big ball’ of mud refers to the unstructured, spaghetti code-bases that emerge from a…

What does a Software Architect do? Do you need one? How do you become one? — What do Software Architects Do? One popular definition is that architecture is the “Important and hard to change decisions” in a software project. Deciding to mandate using camel-case for variables; not important. Deciding to use microservices; a bit more important. Architects typically think at the unit of components, where a component is an independently deployable…

Is there a way to automatically work out what code is all about? — The arrangement of files in a project’s file system can often bear little resemblance to the semantic relationship between them. When developers are working on tasks they frequently need to edit files that are ‘far away from each other together. Previous research has been undertaken into extracting semantic topics from…

How do you choose out of the thousands of languages and does it really matter what you pick? — It’s a problem anyone who’s started a new programming project is familiar with. Which language do you use? You don’t want to realize months down the line that choosing something else would’ve made your code less buggy, easier to maintain, or allow you to just import a module to fix…

Can you tell when whose talking to who? — Within one Slack Channel, multiple different conversations might overlap with each other. Whilst it’s normally simple for a human reader to pull them apart this is non-trivial for a computer to do. This places an obstacle in the path of automatically analyzing text that comes from Slack. …