Recently, I switched jobs from karriere.at, Austria's largest job platform, to the Austrian Federal Computing Centre, where my colleagues and I work on modernizing Austria's digital tax services. One of the first things I noticed, looking at the new codebase, was that we heavily use German terms for naming certain classes, functions, and variables. At first, this seemed to me like a giant red flag. But now, after seeing the problem through a different lens, I realize that in many instances, it can make a lot of sense to use our native tongue to name certain things...
Now and then, fierce debates ignite on Twitter about whether the term Software Architecture is misleading or even harmful. The argument goes as follows...
Every couple of months, I reach a point where I have to declare TODO bankruptcy. The items on my TODO list are getting more and more, and I schedule more and more todos each day to get ahead. But obviously, that doesn't work—quite the opposite...
Over the past few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about effectively maintaining shared code within an organization. For example, think of a private npm package that multiple teams depend on. How can we ensure that changes to shared code made by Team A don't break Team B and C's code...
Whenever we find a severe bug that is caused by an error in a complicated piece of code, in my experience, the first instinct is that better documentation is needed. So that the next time we need to debug the code, at least we know what it is supposed to do. I argue that this is a waste of time...