Article

Oct 1, 2018 ∞

Code quality & security audit

I spent the day at a new client’s office. They hired my to do a complete code quality and security audit for their website and shop system. They are rebuilding and relaunching it. The app is built using Ruby on Rails.

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Sep 28, 2018 ∞

One metric

From the feedback I got for my questions and letters regarding the quality of software projects, I can tell you one metric software developers look for.

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Sep 27, 2018 ∞

Let the computer help you with that comment

Commenting code and documenting it has been a topic in these letters already. I linked to resources on how to write docs etc. For the future, this might not be necessary anymore. Because you can have a machine write the comments for you. There is a research project done by Chinese researchers Xing Hu, Ge Li, Xin Xia, David Lo and Zhi Jin named “Deep Code Comment Generation”.

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Sep 26, 2018 ∞

Time well spent

Yesterday I went to an exciting event. The topic was “Can Artificial Intelligence synthesize software?”. The company Seerene organized the event. I haven’t heard about them before, but they are just what I like. They analyze code and projects for optimization potential and defects. I started the conversation with them, let’s see what comes out of it.

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Sep 25, 2018 ∞

Don't build a five-star hotel

When you want to go on vacation, somewhere far away, where you haven’t been… How do you decide for the hotel? What language speaks to you on the hotel‘s website? What images convey to you that this might be a good hotel? Do you only follow suggestions by a friend? Do you care about the vicinity to tourist attractions or important sights? How did they get your attention?

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Sep 24, 2018 ∞

Risk list

Imagine you are doing a software project. It is mostly going like planned. Things happen. You anticipated them and prepared for them. But there are days when unexpected things happen:

Stack Overflow is down, and your developers suddenly aren’t as productive as usually 😜
Slack is down, and communication is halted. Everyone freaks out, and no work gets done.
Your hoster has problems with their energy and their emergency energy, and servers stop and reboot. You have to take care of this.
all kinds of things…

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Sep 21, 2018 ∞

Cyclomatic complexity

To achieve high quality in your team’s code, you should use tools like a static analyzer. These analyzers give you lots of metrics. One is the cyclomatic complexity. A very reduced definition is, that the more complex your methods are, the higher the cyclomatic complexity. A high complexity results from many different paths the program can take while running your code. Many conditionals (if/else) or branches in your code lead to higher complexity.

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Sep 20, 2018 ∞

How to paint a fence

If you paint a fence, you need to make sure to prepare the wood. Take coarse-grained sandpaper and sand the old paint. You have to take it off the wood completely. Once you are done with it, you should use a primer and put it onto the wood. Let it dry for a few hours. After the primer has dried, you take your color and apply it thinly. Let it dry for another 6 hours. The next step is to apply the color again and let it dry again. Afterward, you can decide whether you need protective paint/lacquer, to guard against weather conditions. That depends on your location.

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Sep 19, 2018 ∞

Planning for technical debt

Do you know the term technical debt? Wikipedia describes it as “a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt) This is certainly a correct definition, but there’s more to it. We’ll get to that shortly.

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Sep 18, 2018 ∞

Standing in for quality

If you read these letters for a few issues, you might have already noticed that I like quality in software engineering. I try to optimize for quality and enhancing the quality of a project leads to more successful projects and more satisfied clients. If you care for the quality it can lead to situations where you have to stand your ground to achieve the goal of increasing the quality (or your processes or your products). Because doing high-quality work also increases the costs of a project. And it’s rare that managers don’t care for the cost of a project.

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Sep 17, 2018 ∞

All your data are belong to us

The latest Chrome beta (version 70) introduces changes to the Shape Detection API and the Web Authentication API.

The Shape Detection API consists of three APIs: A Face Detection API, a Barcode Detection API and a Text Detection API. Given an image bitmap or a blob, the Face Detection API returns the location of faces and the locations of eyes, noses, and mouths within those faces. To give you rudimentary control of performance, you can limit the number of returned faces and prioritize speed over performance.

They cannot (yet) compare faces and recognize known faces in the browser. Give it a year. Soon browser plugin creators are able to scan the photos you upload to Facebook and identify the people you had fun with last night. If you think I am exaggerating, please wait for the next paragraph.

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Sep 17, 2018 ∞

All your data are belong to us

The latest Chrome beta (version 70) introduces changes to the Shape Detection API and the Web Authentication API.

The Shape Detection API consists of three APIs: A Face Detection API, a Barcode Detection API and a Text Detection API. Given an image bitmap or a blob, the Face Detection API returns the location of faces and the locations of eyes, noses, and mouths within those faces. To give you rudimentary control of performance, you can limit the number of returned faces and prioritize speed over performance.

They cannot (yet) compare faces and recognize known faces in the browser. Give it a year. Soon browser plugin creators are able to scan the photos you upload to Facebook and identify the people you had fun with last night. If you think I am exaggerating, please wait for the next paragraph.

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Sep 14, 2018 ∞

Again, why are we doing this?

Imagine you have a team member that always criticises your work. You make commit after commit and put your best effort forth, you try to find the best names for variables and methods. You check your code using tools like RuboCop and Linters. Yet in every pull request, he asks you whether you considered refactoring objects. Things like extracting some logic out of a class, introducing view models and repository objects and sometimes even crazy stuff like domain driven design ideas. Why can’t he leave you alone?

I tell you why: Because the fundamentals matter. They make the difference between software projects where things go smoothly and projects that just fail.

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Sep 14, 2018 ∞

Again, why are we doing this?

Imagine you have a team member that always criticises your work. You make commit after commit and put your best effort forth, you try to find the best names for variables and methods. You check your code using tools like RuboCop and Linters. Yet in every pull request, he asks you whether you considered refactoring objects. Things like extracting some logic out of a class, introducing view models and repository objects and sometimes even crazy stuff like domain driven design ideas. Why can’t he leave you alone?

I tell you why: Because the fundamentals matter. They make the difference between software projects where things go smoothly and projects that just fail.

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Sep 13, 2018 ∞

Art

The other week I went on vacation with my family. We flew to Switzerland and had a really great time. I took the big camera to make gorgeous shots of my wife, my baby daughter and the Alps. The iPhone camera is great but pales in comparison to a professional camera. As I am no great photographer you can see this in every shot. But still, the pictures I made with the DSLR are just better. When using a big camera I always try to take more time for the composition of the shot. I use the lens, different focus spots and depth of field way more than when shooting with my phone.

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Sep 12, 2018 ∞

Where's your GPS

Imagine you are about to go on a trip. Perhaps with your partner or some friends. You want to take the car into the woods, to a place you have never been. The vacation spot has a nice house with a pool and a barbecue. The woman you rent it from stocked the fridge with cold drinks. And they have water beds. And WIFI! IN THE WOODS!

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Sep 11, 2018 ∞

The four types of documentation

You probably already noticed from the title of this letter, the topic of documentation is still important to me. Now that I began spending time with it I notice the many different aspects of documentation. And there’s more than I thought.

Today I want to share a resource with you that taught me about the four different levels/types of docs. I didn’t even know that there were four levels, or why they mattered. They start with something very important:

It doesn’t matter how good your software is, because if the documentation is not good enough, people will not use it.

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Sep 10, 2018 ∞

Stardom (continued)

I received great replies to my letter last week. I want to quote two for you today.

First is Jacob Wyke on the question why these people become some kinds of star for you an me.

I think its because they teach people things, and so generations of developers look up to them as they taught them things.

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Sep 7, 2018 ∞

Stardom

Do we have software development stars? I was wondering. We have people like David Heinemeier-Hanson who created Rails. We have Martin Fowler and Uncle Bob, among several others. Are these stars?

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Sep 5, 2018 ∞

Code Quality through high-quality docs

Hi friend.

I am going to drum the quality drum again. This is a big topic and I know for a fact that I haven’t even scratched the surface of what there is to say about it.

About a month ago I wrote

I’d like to admit, I never had a mentor or teacher who showed me how to properly document software. It was all learning by doing. If you don’t mind, I’ll take some future episodes of this newsletter to document (see what I did there? 👅) my findings and further thoughts about this topic.

This is one of these letters about documentation. My knowledge hasn’t grown by as much as I would have loved, but I read some interesting articles about docs. I want to share these with you.

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