Articles
Joel Spolsky’s once prolific blogging output dried up years ago, but Things You Should Never Do, Part I is still a classic after 22 years. He wrote it as an outsider’s postmortem following the first beta release (6) of Netscape’s browser, three years after the previous major release 4. There never was a version 5. The team had decided on a full rewrite, and the resulting delay probably cost them their competitive advantage over Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
“If Netscape actually had some adult supervision with software industry experience, they might not have shot themselves in the foot so badly”, he closes.
Much like running up bills on your credit card, technical debt can easily get out of hand. To avoid this happening, you need to keep track of how much debt you’re building up.
Technical debt metrics are designed to help you make sense of all the data you collect. There are many different metrics to choose from nowadays, and plenty of tools for recording the data.
In most cases, you aren’t the only person working on the same project or codebase. That means that other people get to read your code and have to understand it. That’s also true for the code comments you leave behind. Developers often write ‘quick and dirty’ comments without much context, leaving other developers clueless about what you’re trying to say. It’s a bad practice that creates only more confusion than clarifies things.
So, yes – you should be bothered with writing meaningful code comments to help other developers. A code comment that describes the function, the reasoning behind the function, and its input and output will speed up the learning process of other developers. Especially for junior developers, this information comes in handy when learning the code.
What is a No-Code Tool?
Low-Code vs. No-Code Tools
Advantages of No-Code Solutions
- Resources: Human Capital is becoming increasingly scarce — and therefore expensive. This can stop a lot of ambitious projects dead in their tracks. Low-Code and No-Code tools minimize the amount of specialized technical skills needed to get an application of the ground, which means things can get done more quickly and at a lower cost.
- Low Risk/High ROI: Security processes, data integrations, and cross-platform support are all built into Low-Code and No-Code tools, meaning less risk and more time to focus on your business goals.
- Moving to Production: Similarly, for both types of tools a single click is all it takes to send or deploy a model or application you built to production.
List of No-Code Data Tools
1. No-Code Data Modeling in Power BI
2. Alteryx as a Low-Code Alternative
3. Is Tableau a No-Code Data Modeling Solution?
4. Looker is a No-Code Alternative to SQL
You might be wondering why I am including so many BI/Visualization platforms when talking about potential alternatives to SQL. After all, these tools are only set up to address an organization’s reporting needs, which constitute only one of the use cases for data queries and SQL. This is certainly a valid point, so allow me to clarify my reasoning a bit more.
While it is true that reporting is only one of many potential uses for SQL, it is nevertheless an extremely important one. There is a good reason why there are so many No-Code BI tools in the market—to address heightening demand from enterprises around the world — and therefore, it is worth taking a closer look at their almost inevitable shortcomings.
Organizations are continuously looking for ways to track, measure, and evaluate developer workflows. Done effectively, this creates the means to improve performance and code quality, reduce time to market and increase profits. But it’s not always easy to measure efficiency. What may first appear to be evidence of a team’s hard work may be an indication of the bigger challenges and inefficiencies of code churn.
What Is Code Churn?
Code churn is a measure or indication of how often a file changes. It typically refers to how often a developer throws out code (such as a function, file, or class) within the first 2-3 weeks of writing.
Last week we hosted a webinar where Alex Omeyer interviewed Adam Tornhill about technical debt: what is it, why it’s important, and how to manage it effectively. For this article, we’ve chosen some of the most interesting questions we’ve got from the audience. If you’re curious to learn more — check out the full version of the webinar.
Alex: I’m Alex, the Co‑founder, and CEO of Stepsize. I spend all of my time talking about technical debt with Engineering team members, and I’m genuinely pumped to have Adam, CTO and Founder of CodeScene, with me today.
If you’ve read our piece about the habits engineers need to beat tech debt, you might recall Conway’s law, which states that organizations which design systems […] are constrained to produce designs that are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
It’s one of the forces that can push us towards technical bankruptcy because the systems designed by software engineers are constrained by their company’s organizational structure, over which they have little control. The right way to fight these forces is to talk about tech debt across the whole company so that everyone can understand why it’s vital to manage it carefully.
Introduction
Rails version 1.0 is approaching its 15 year anniversary, and there’s reason to celebrate the framework’s progress.
There have been hundreds of amazing products built with Rails since its creation.
The real problem is this: Why should you care about how much a delayed release costs you? Maybe you have a “sweet spot” in the way you start your projects or release them. “It just takes that long here.” (That’s the sign of a system impediment.)
Now, let’s try to calculate that cost of delay.