As a Software Developer, How Do You Actually Communicate Better?

Assumption is the mother of all mistakes” — Mr. Eugene Lewis Fordsworthe.

Most of my takes on the importance of communication in the software development space has been from the perspective of the team lead or manager. In this article I want to talk about communication from the perspective of a regular team member and how one can communicate more effectively on their team. I believe some of the suggestions below may even help you standout in your team and earn your team lead’s respect. Here they are:­

Continue reading

Size Matters in Software Development

Size was the single most important factor in the resolution of project outcome.” — CHAOS Report 2015, Standish Group.

The larger a software project is, the higher the chances it’ll fail. Let’s define what makes a software project large. Any project with more than 1M source lines of code (SLOC) is considered a large project. 100k to 1M SLOC would fall into the medium category, while any software project with 10k to 100k SLOC can be considered small. A software project with less than 10k SLOC is tiny.

Continue reading

Attention, Distractions, and Context Switching

Anything you focus on will flourish

The information age has brought a lot of pressure on people’s attention. You are not immune to it and your software development team definitely isn’t either. The nature of software development requires long uninterrupted blocks of time to focus on problem solving. The longer you focus on a problem without interruptions the deeper you get into a state of flow, commonly referred to as being “in the zone”. Where everything is fluid, and smooth, and… until someone taps you on the shoulder just to tell you that they sent you an email 3 seconds ago.

Continue reading

Software Deterioration

I recently downloaded a software tool to help me complete a task but upon executing it, it failed to run. Initially I thought it was due to the poor internet connection. I fixed the network but it still won’t run. No error messages, nothing. After a few minutes of trying different things I realised that the software won’t run because a library it relied on was no longer supported by the operating system I was using. Software deterioration is the phrase used to describe this type of situation.

Continue reading

Books I Read in 2016

Every year is full of ups and downs and my 2016 was full of extremes. From traveling to places I had never been to before to picking up some habits I wish I had developed earlier. One of such habits is reading books and that is exactly what this post is about. Before now I hardly read books and even when I do it’s mainly for some technical reference or something similar. I read more books this year than any other year.

Continue reading