Category: software-engineering

Why naming stuff is hard?

Last few months I have spent a lot of time doing code reviews. During the code review exercise I also pair with developers to refactor and improve the quality of their pull requests (PR).  I care about two things in code reviews – correctness and understandability. In this post I will not focus on correctness (I might write a future post on this). Today, I want to focus on most important aspect of making code easier to understand – good names. Most of the time that I spend in the code review is coming up with the intention revealing names for classes, methods, interfaces, variables, packages, modules, and Microservices. I find most developers (irrespective of experience level) struggle to come up with good names. 

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. 

Phil Karlton

In this post I will list three reasons I think developers struggle to come up with good names.

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You can’t outsource product management

There are many reasons why software projects fail. In this post I will cover one of the main reasons I think  outsource product development fails to deliver the right product at the right time. The reason is that customers outsource product management as well. They think their job is done after sharing the wireframes. These wireframes are typically created by a third party design agency. Customer product team usually works closely with the design agency. They will usually call this an MVP. The only thing they get from the whole MVP concept is that it needs to be delivered faster to the end customer. They completely ignore the minimal part. I usually see MVPs with more than 500 screens. These do not include failure states. I know screens are not the right measure of the application complexity but during the proposal phase this is the max you will get.

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