As a teenager, running was my sport. I ran 3 nights a week for training, with a race every weekend. Most of the races were cross-country, giving me a weekly hit of the beautiful Irish countryside and lungfuls of fresh air. I fondly recall the community that was built around these racing events. Even in races with as few as 3 participants, supporters would hang around and cheer on each individual....
Software engineering is cognitively taxing work. Each day is spent in many hours of deep focus. Over the years you refine the capacity to enter and stay in this deeply focused state. This enables you to work on complex tasks for long periods. It comes at a cost though. I like to view the mind as a large ship. It takes some time to bring it up to speed and get into that deep state of focus....
A friend and I recently started working on a new side project. We decided to take the opportunity to experiment with a new tech stack. After settling on using SvelteKit, we wanted something lightweight and easy to use as our backend and database. After some browsing, we found a lot of people mentioning having a great experience using PocketBase in conjunction with SvelteKit. So without overthinking it, we decided to run with these referrals and dive headfirst into this new stack....
Unit tests are an instrumental part of the software development lifecycle. Making changes to your system without good unit test coverage can have disastrous consequences, so it is common to optimise for high unit test coverage. However, there is another metric that is important to optimise to reap maximum benefits from unit tests. That is how long it takes them to execute. Feedback loops Generally speaking, making changes to your codebase consists of two major steps:...
In the modern office where we are constantly bombarded by meeting invitations and Teams or Slack messages throughout the day it can be hard to keep track of each and every ask or commitment. It’s critical that you have some way to keep track of these tasks in order to alleviate the mental burden of remembering everything you need to do each day, week, month and so on. Most software engineering teams will use some sort of a backlog to keep track of their tasks, assigning tasks to upcoming sprints to be worked on....
The hot topic of the day is generative AI and in the last year, it has launched itself headlong into the workplace. We’re seeing tools pop up left, right and centre to help lighten the burden of any number of tasks. This has been particularly interesting for software engineers as tools like Github Copilot and Google Bard offer the ability to generate code on a scale never seen before. Some research shows that Copilot “enabled engineers to complete tasks 55% faster than engineers not using Copilot”....
As software engineers, we have an amazing ability to get deeply absorbed in a problem and work tirelessly until we crack it. All of us are intimately familiar with the deep satisfaction we experience once we unlock the solution to a problem we’ve been chipping away at. For many of us, this problem solving loop is the driving force behind our work. As we grow as engineers and take on problems beyond trivial scope, we will sometimes find ourselves stuck, unable to make meaningful progress....
In your first few months as a software engineer, you will be bombarded with information. It is extremely common to feel quite overwhelmed during this period. You observe experienced engineers around you seemingly flying through tasks. Meanwhile you are stuck trying to compile the project on your machine, blocked by some obscure console error. One common route to resolving various issues you encounter is to simply ask a team member for help....