How to Improve Critical Thinking as a Programmer

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As a programmer, one of your greatest assets is going to be your ability to think critically. No matter how well you know a specific language, or how many lines of code you’ve written in the past, if you can’t employ creative or lateral thinking to your job, you won’t be able to solve problems efficiently, or come up with ingenious new ways to create features.

The problem is, you can’t “learn” critical thinking the way you can learn the basics of a programming language. Instead, critical thinking is a soft skill that has to be cultivated over time, often through subtler strategies than simply taking a lesson.

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Diversity and Inclusion: An Interview with Sushila Sahay at Reactive Summit

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Sushila Sahay, the Vice President of Customer Operations & HR at Lightbend, is a Peruvian-born Canadian of Indian heritage with a passion for business, technology, and human connection. Striving to have a positive impact on everyone with whom she interacts, she has spent over 25 years with tech companies and forged a successful career leading global teams and initiatives for Silicon Valley startups. Currently, she leads all Customer and Employee Success teams globally. A classically trained singer, she holds an MBA with Honors in Strategic Management from the University of Alberta.

At the Reactive Summit in Montreal, Sushila is hosting a panel discussion called,“Diversity and Inclusion: Bring the Thunder” with Naomi Davidson (CEO at Trybe), Mona Eldam (Managing Director/Global Head of Transactional Data team at Morgan Stanley), Tara Hernandez (Senior Engineering Manager at Google), and Hywel Evans (Senior Director, Global Solutions Architect at Lightbend), sharing personal stories along with research knowledge to provide insight into how to create an inclusive environment in day-to-day work.

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Forget About the 10x Developer, Focus on 3x Instead

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I am going to open up a controversial subject, the 10x developer myth.

This subject has been debated by the industry for decades, so why bring it up again?

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Effort vs. Productivity on Software Development

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I am sure you have heard that software developers are lazy. They don’t do much most of the time and only actually work a couple of hours over the day.

When you are in an assembly plant, for example, assembling televisions, it’s an issue in that type of work if someone stops doing his task for just a couple of minutes. Those couple of minutes will mean that fewer televisions will be produced and when we convert that to money, it will raise the cost of the product.

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Putting Performance SLAs on the Agile Task Board

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When it comes to application testing, many project managers and test leads do not routinely conduct performance and load testing early in the development lifecycle. Instead, they undertake performance, and load testing after the application is complete, at the point where functional testing is applied. In fact, in many organizations, the performance test is frequently the last step — almost an afterthought — conducted right before the application goes into production.

This approach creates a classic problem: late-stage testing. Whenever testers identify issues, developers must modify the long-finalized code to fix them. These code changes can impact other parts of the application, resulting in breaks. Addressing problems after-the-fact is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, any delay in releasing a new feature or a new app can directly impact revenue, competitive position, brand, and adoption.

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How Should We Organize Our Teams?

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My team is the owner of different trading platforms and the core services around it. But we depend heavily on other products (e.g. financial feeds, client identification, services to send orders to stock markets, etc.). And of course, each of the team managing these services have other platforms that are their clients.

When Vasco Duarte and I ran the #NoEstimates/#NoProjects workshop (or #NoNoWorkshop as I think of it) in Switzerland last month, the attendees asked some good questions. With Project Myopia done and published, and Continuous Digital almost done, it seemed like a good time to repeat, and elaborate, the answers publicly. This will take a few blog posts to work through.

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TDD Example in Software Development (Part 2)

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Let’s continue with our series of TDD articles. In the first part, we looked at the theory behind TDD and Unit Testing. In this second part, we begin to develop our application, an application of notes where a user can write notes and everything that comes to our mind. Please, leave comments if you are interested in seeing how we develop any specific functionality in our application.

TDD First Cycle

To start developing our application, we could start with the user entity (quite generic and it is used for everything). We will see later if it is necessary to change it to something more concrete.

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Dealing With Rutsey, Bartman or Omarosa On Your Team

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Like anything with longevity attached to it, the more time you spend doing something, the more time you encounter outlying situations that can be lesson learning opportunities. For this article, I am going to talk about three distinct and unique personalities I have encountered over the years.

The John Rutsey

Back in the 1960’s, there was a Canadian by the name of John Rutsey. He loved hockey and music. Based upon his geographical location he became close friends with a classmate named Alex Lifeson. Eventually, their love of music spawned them to begin learning music themselves to the point where they joined forces with a guy named Geddy Lee and released a self-titled album for their band "Rush." John Rutsey was the first drummer of the band that consisted of guitar, bass and drums. Facing musical differences and health concerns, Rutsey left the band and was replaced with Neil Peart — which was the game changer for the band that continued to release albums and tour effectively for the next 41 years.

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4 Things I Include in My Agile Estimations

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Estimation is one of the most difficult aspects of the Agile process. The natural tendency of team members is to include only the time it will take to complete the actual work for the item they are estimating. I have a process where I break each work item down into 4 parts to help me get a more accurate estimate. This is a process I use all the time in my current role as CTO of CUE Marketplace and I hope it helps you in your Agile estimations.

Understanding the Big Picture Estimate

I want to know every aspect of the work item that I’ll be completing, so I add any time it would take for me to fully understand it. It’s a huge time saver if my Product Owner has written the work items as user stories. That format helps with the “who,” “what,” and “why.” Other items that could take time include understanding any UI designs/clickable demos, reviewing usability tests and getting to know the “who” part of the story by researching the customer or persona.

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7 Basic Principles of Software Testing You Must Know [Video]

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Consider a scenario where you are moving a file from folder A to folder B. Think about all the possible ways you can test this. Apart from the usual scenarios, you can test the following conditions:

  • Trying to move the file when it is opened
  • You do not have the security rights to paste the file in folder B
  • Folder B is on a shared Drive and storage capacity is full
  • Folder B already has a file with the same name

In fact, the list is endless. Supposed you have 15 input fields to test each having 5 possible values, the number of combinations to be tested would be 5¹⁵=30,517,578,125.

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