Make Better Decisions

Thanks to @farnamstreet for these great points that he posted on Twitter. It reminded me of a good conversation I had with a friend about the ‘right’ decision and a ‘good’ decision.

A good decision is the best decision you can make based on the evidence at hand at the moment you need to decide. If it will be the ‘right’ one – only time can tell. Btw, it is good to remember that many decisions are reversible. With those types of decisions, you can use a light-weight process. You don’t have to live with the consequences for that long if you can change it (which is easy to say and hard to do). You should improve your skills to recognize quickly that a decision is wrong. When you become good at course correction, you will be able to ‘fail quickly’ and move forward fast. If you wish to get better and increase the odds to have good decisions that turn out on the right side, here is a list of rules to help with the process.

How to take a better decision?

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Code Reviews Will Improve You

There are many options to improve your software quality. One of the most effective methods is to do code reviews with other developers.
Code reviews are as much a social interaction as a technical best practice. In a healthy engineering culture (egoless), team members engage their peers to improve the quality of their code and increase their productivity. Developers understand that the time they spend looking at a colleague’s code is repaid when other team members examine their own deliverables. These days, most of the companies (e.g. Facebook, Netflix, Google, Amazon, Uber) are embracing it, so it’s another sign that something is working well here.

Why Ask For A Peer Review?

1. The most basic reason is to find bugs.
   If you won’t ask for it, you will miss bugs in your code:
   a. Accidental errors – typos or mixing variables.
   b. Structural errors – dead code, logic or algorithm bugs, performance or architecture concerns. These are often much easier to spot for an external reviewers the see your work from their perspective.
2. You preventing from yourself a great way to learn and get better – Committers are motivated by the notion of a viewer who will look over the change request: the committer tends to clean up loose ends, consolidate TODOs, and generally improve the commit.
3. Your code is not as clear as you think it is nor its testability and readability.

Code reviews are very important not only for developers but also to product managers, test engineers, designers and others. In many cases, developers will be the first ones to see the benefits. It will allow them to move faster and with higher quality.

The Monty Hall Problem

The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser loosely based on the American television game show “Let’s Make a Deal” and named after its original host, Monty Hall.

I wrote a little web app that show you what is the right choice with a simulator. It’s a bit hard to explain the correct solution as it’s going against ‘common’ sense.

Important Books That Are Delight To Read

There are around 130 million books around the world.

Let’s say that you can read 2 books a week. In a year, you will be able to read ~100 books and if you keep this pace for the next 80-90 years you have a chance to read ~9000 books which is only 0.007% from the total amount.

So a good question would be:

Which books would you choose to read?

I am collecting suggestions, so please feel free to share.

Lago Di Garda

When you are talking about cloud computing with your kids…

The Evolution of Everything – Book Review

Last week I finished an interesting book by Matt Ridley (the author of several good books on genetics and evolution) – “The Evolution of Everything”.

The main idea from the book is simple, yet to many people disturbing: government, technology, society, religion and other areas evolves without any real control over the process. Although we neglect and ignore them, bottom-up trends shape the world in many aspects.

Testing Software – Best Practices

Some (raw) thoughts on what are the elements that give you a quality and testable code.
It’s not a full list of TODOs but some best practices that should serve you as a good baseline. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment.

Tests

If we agree that you must have tests in your project – The next good question is what is a good test?

1. It’s FAST – The tests should run fast in order to encourage developers to use them constantly during the development process.
2. Stable – The test doesn’t break often. You wish to minimize the false-positive ratio as much as you can. This is why you need ‘small’ tests that are encapsulated and give you a clear sign on what is working (or not).
3. Easy to read and understand.
4. Catches Bugs! When a test fails it’s most probably a bug.