TL;DR style notes from articles I read today.

Top 5 Surprises When Starting Out as a Software Developer

• Programming isn’t a solitary activity. It needs a lot of interactions with people
• Writing well (clear & unambiguous) matters, be it your code, documentation, bug descriptions or be it your emails
• Software is never done. Anything new you create has to fit into something that’s existing already. A large of creating new software functionalities is understanding the existing code.
• Real-world favors simplicity. All the clever algorithms you learned may never come to use.
• Scale creates complexity. Complexity arises from the aggregation of many simple parts, not from complex parts.

Full post here, 4 mins read

Using spec-first API Development for Speed and Sanity

Reasons to consider spec-first API development:

• Tight feedback loops
• Effective feedback about API design
• Minimal wasted effort
• Contract testing for safety

Full post here, 9 mins read

Scaling a Mature Data Pipeline — Managing Overhead

• Over time, you end up encoding application structure in the data pipeline. Application logic gets coupled with orchestration logic.
• Orchestration complexity causes overhead. This complexity scales with the depth of the data pipeline.
• When you decouple orchestration logic from application logic, you get tools to fight the overhead, without compromising the quality of the application.
• When trying to reduce the run time of a data pipeline, analyze the whole pipeline’s execution time, not just the obvious factors like map-reduce computation time.
• Focus on fault tolerance considerations.

Full post here, 11 mins read

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