Software Engineering

My first exposure to code generation was from an mentor that had acively practiced it around 1990, so this is not a new topic, however one that does not get enough attention.

The age old reference to when something is too good to be true, it probably is. ORM technologies are a great abstraction from the low level details of working with data. In this article, I am going to address some of the pitfalls and best practices when working with this type of technology. I will pretty much focus on ORM based data stores here, with not much empasis on non relational based stores.

Comming from a background in relational data stores, exposure to a non relational approach, MongoDB in my case, has been an interesting experience.

Global level variables are generally recognized as an no-no in software development, however there are a few rare cases where they come in handy. Let's take a look into how to implement this approach to track unique transaction ids across an API call stack.

From an early point on in my career I was exposed to unit testing In particular, Junit was gaining adoption in the Java programming language space These days, there is typically testing frameworks for most stack approaches (NodeJS, Ruby on Rails, etc)/ The really hard part is when and how much to apply this. Let’s me share a few thoughts on this and how it impacts your coding style.

A REST based API implementation used to serve mock data in order to support front end development tasks. This helps to recreate use cases for delayed responses, large files, error conditions, etc.

Implementing large sets of business logic can quickly result in a 'back box', where visibility at a transaction level is very limited. Traditional logging is not effective for these cases. Let's take a look at an alternate approach where the code is instrumented and activity is reported in an easy to interpret manner.

Coding is an interesting field, I have found myself in positions reqiuring my to wear a number different hats. At one particular role, I was tasked with implementing a series of background processes, each complex in nature. A few lessons learn the hard way.