Author Archives: tamasrev

About tamasrev

Java bugrammer, reader, writer. Father, sometimes mother.

Deliberate practice with Lean poker

Posted on February 3, 2024 by tamasrev

Last November Ivett invited me to participate at her Lean Poker event. I was a bit skeptic, as I stopped learning in my free time long ago. There is nothing wrong with learning in your free time, I just re-prioritized … Continue reading →

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Survival kit: (don’t always) find a solution on your own

Posted on January 2, 2022 by tamasrev

The problem There is this message that every developer is getting every once in a while. When they ask a question, a colleague might reply with something like ‘Find a solution on your own.’ I find this message especially toxic, … Continue reading →

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Survival kit: first day on the job

Posted on August 31, 2021 by tamasrev

This is an actual survival kit: what should you bring on your first day of job, and how to prepare. A step by step guide. Sleep well if you can. I am generally an axious person, so usully I don’t. … Continue reading →

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Survival kit: Refactoring

Posted on June 9, 2021 by tamasrev

Refactoring – improving the design of existing code. This is the title of Martin Fowlers book. This book is so fundamental, even the IDE-s (Integrated Development Environments) support refactorings. This is a screenshot of a refactoring context menu from IntelliJ: … Continue reading →

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Survival kit: How to deal with pushback?

Posted on June 2, 2021 by tamasrev

I know a lot of engineers whom I respect, and disagree with me about the stuff I am writing. Some think that unit testing is not necessary. Or it is a skill orthogonal to development, i.e. not needed – testers … Continue reading →

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Survival kit: code quality and static analyzers

Posted on May 19, 2021 by tamasrev

Quite often I see junior developers worrying about the logic they write, and not caring too much about the code quality. That’s just aesthetics, it’s quite subjective, they say. Not really surprising, I had the same mindset back then. If … Continue reading →

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Survival kit: unit tests as repeatable experiments

Posted on May 5, 2021 by tamasrev

There is a lot of confusion regarding unit tests. Do we deliver faster or slower with unit tests? Do unit tests finalize the code, or do they open it up for a change? Shall we have more test code than … Continue reading →

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Survival kit: git

Posted on April 28, 2021 by tamasrev

I am, to some extent, familiar with git. That’s the only distributed VCS which I’ve been using long enough. There are other distributed VCS-s too, like mercurial, Bazaar, Fossil. I am not familiar with them, so in tis post I’ll … Continue reading →

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Survival kit: Learn what you do: spiralic reactive learning

Posted on April 21, 2021 by tamasrev

So, you started a job, they might or might not give you a training. And there you are, looking at technologies you hardly know. Half of the words are unknown to you, yet you are expected to do something at … Continue reading →

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Survival kit: the obviousnesses

Posted on April 14, 2021 by tamasrev

So many things are “obvious”, especially on stack overflow. Believe me, most of us learn these obviousities the hard way, like, erm, why does this simple SQL UPDATE run so long? Still, some of us forget these incidents. All they … Continue reading →

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