The Good Bits - July 6

This is the first in what will be a recurring series of blog posts for me. As an avid learner in general, and in the field ofsoftware development more specifically, I come across a great many articles and blog posts which I find valuable and/or interesting. Beginning with this post, I will collate the best of that information along with a few of my own thoughts and publish it for you.

Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry –An interesting post from 2013 by James Hague where he discusses the reality of modern software engineering jobs. The guts and the glory of any software solution, the algorithms or designs that are so highly prized, represent a small fraction of the actual work on any project. The rest of theeffort goes into supporting code such as file I/O, maintaining state, orerror handling. Organizational skills such asrefactoring, simplifying, and reducing complexity are put to much more use and therefore should be more highly valued.

Succeeding with Automated Integration Tests – End to end integration testing of your software is critical to its stability and success, but it can be a challenge to set up correctly. In this post, Jeremy Miller discusses some of his tips for making your integration testing more effective, efficient and reliable. I particularly appreciated his emphasis on continuous integration as a key to getting value from automated testing.

5 Tips for Being an Effective Tech Lead – Are you a tech lead, or are you working toward that position in the future? This helpful post from Patrick Kua will enlighten you about some of the ways to be effective in that role. His reminder to stay in the code rang true for me. There’s no worse position than being a tech lead that has lost touch with the codebase. He also pointed out that this will help you build respect from the rest of the team, which has additional benefits.