Practical Software Development

It is sometimes hard to notice, but many of the foundations of computer science and programming come from mathematics and their many branches. One example of that is the famous Big O notation, a technique so useful to evaluate an algorithm’s time and space complexity that nowadays it is part of most job interviews. The…

A couple of years ago I was working on a very challenging and interesting project, which had many features competing to go live. We had a line of internal customers ready to use our product as soon as we added the features they needed, and everything was working fine as we had a clear roadmap…

The traditional saying goes “An image is worth a thousand words”, and I strongly believe this applies to diagrams as well. It doesn’t matter how many words we spend trying to explain the nuances of a system: sometimes we just need a simple diagram to put all the pieces together. For many decades, there were…

Part of our day-to-day tasks is to do code refactoring. As part of this process, I’m sure that many of us have had to negate the logical expressions in if or while statements at least once. For example, we may want to change this code: into something like this: This is indeed a very simple…

One of the many things I’ve learnt from the Clean Code book is about the evils of output variables. Functions can take arguments and can return values. An output variable is one of those arguments that the function uses to give a result by changing its value instead of, or in addition to, the function’s…

Early in my career, I managed to land a great job that would allow me to work on a bunch of interesting features, with amazing people, while getting hands-on skills that I could use at other companies, and also paying a good salary: It was the whole package! After so many attempts at landing a…

Some time ago, I worked on a feature that would increase the load on my team’s backend service from 5 thousand to 50 million requests per day, a 10,000 times increase in traffic, and we needed to make sure that it could handle that huge grow, which was a bit daunting. In this article, I…

It is usually well understood that decoupled software helps us easily change, test, reuse, understand, and extend our code. For this reason, many of us will either advocate or hear someone promoting decoupled code when we build our systems. There are a number of techniques that we can use to do this, and today I’ll…

As a backend developer, I do a lot of my work in a terminal (although, admittedly, not as much as I used to). That is why I had no doubt about trying out Ghostty, a new terminal emulator, as soon as it was released a few months ago, late last year. Ghostty provides a number…