Engineering Practice

The debate about AI and software engineering is focused on the wrong thing. One side says AI will make engineers far more productive. The other says it will fill codebases with AI slop. Both sides are right. AI is not good or bad by…

I keep having the same argument. Someone writes a ticket. "Add a dropdown for country selection on the signup form." Fine. An engineer builds it. Ships it. The stakeholder looks at it and goes "No, that’s not what I meant." Now everyone’s…

The Age-Old Quest for a "What-If Machine" Whether you are a business leader, a policymaker, or a team manager, you face a fundamental challenge: making decisions with incomplete information about how people will react. We launch new…

We stand at a peculiar moment in history. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has left us simultaneously exhilarated and anxious, caught between dreams of utopia and nightmares of obsolescence. But while much of the discourse…

When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, it was a groundbreaking device that redefined what a smartphone could be. Yet, one glaring omission caught the attention of early users: there was no copy-and-paste functionality. For many, this…

Listen up, code monkeys! Today we’re going to talk about something that might make you squirm a little: the command line. You know, that scary black screen with the blinking cursor that makes you feel like you’ve time-traveled back to…

I haven’t written much lately about Quantum Computing, not because it’s less interesting, just because I’ve been so preoccupied with all of the breakthroughs in the Artificial Intelligence research, that frankly its consumed all of my time…

In 2018, quantum technicians and daring developers are using quantum algorithms to transform the field of artificial neural network optimization: the bees knees of machine learning and AI. So we can say with some confidence that thanks to…

Java isn’t just a language; it’s an ecosystem. You can write code for the JVM without writing any Java. This gives you the option of using a more modern language. Some of the shortcomings of Java are obvious. It makes you write a lot of…

(This is part 3 in a series of posts on artificial intelligence and deep learning/neural networks. You can check out part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t yet read them and are new to AI) There was a time when artificial intelligence was only…

Grokking RxJava Disclaimer: RxJava is a beast. A beautiful beast, but a beast none the less. There is a lot to it and I can’t cover it all in this post. I tried to use the Pareto Principle to cover the 20% that will give you 80% of what…

The world of programming is always changing. And changing FAST at that. We are constantly finding better ways to do what it is that we do. That is a great thing. Iteration is a very powerful concept. However, there are a few ideas and…

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about unit testing and its importance in developing quality software. You can find that here. A topic that is seen a lot when discussing unit testing is the idea of “mocking” objects (I’ll explain this in…

SPOILER ALERT: Yes. Code without tests is such an old idea that in his book “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” (written in 2004!) Michael Feather defines “Legacy Code” as code that is not accompanied by unit tests. This should be…

Not a day goes by anymore where you don’t hear someone mention “The Cloud” in some context. Cloud services and solutions are all the rage these days. Why though? What do these solutions offer to businesses that they don’t already have?What…

Whenever I interview candidates for a position (whether a developer position or not), I want to know one very important thing about them. Something that, for me, has been the number one key attribute that successful employees all have.…

Design patterns in software development have been around for a little while now. They were made famous in 1994 from the book Design Patters: Elements of Reusable Software and consequently made the authors so famous that they are often now…

Every team needs a great leader. That is especially true for software teams. Between fighting back bugs, developing awesome new features, and rushing to meet deadlines, team members need someone to turn to that they can count on. But who?…

Good software is typically developed with the idea that it should be easy and intuitive for the user to use. Don’t Make Me Think is a book written by Steve Krug about human-computer interaction and usability that stresses that this…

Amazon has been in the news a lot recently. If you have not heard, the New York Times released an article last week that shed some light on what it is like to work at the giant tech enterprise, and (spoiler alert) it didn’t make Amazon…

A month or two ago I wrote a post titled “Every Programmer Should Understand This”. I received a bunch of comments on the post, some of which were from people agreeing with the article and some which thought I should be hung for suggesting…

I have worked with a large variety of programmers. Some were what the industry call “junior” developers (beginners) and some were “senior” developers (experts). While working with these people I started to notice that the better…

I love programming. If you are reading this article then there is a good chance that you do too, or are at least interested in the idea. The problem with programming for a company these days though is that the problems we are solving just…

As a software developer (or someone involved in higher level mathematics) you’ve probably heard the term “Big-O” used a lot. I remember skimming through my Introduction to Algorithms book in college and wondering what the heck “Big-O” was…

Along with whether or not Al Gore invented the Internet, figuring out the correct pronunciation of GIF is one of the earliest questions of the Internet. I grew up believing it was hard-G GIF. Most people I know pronounce it like that too.…

WARNING: Below contains strong opinions that you may not agree with! Read at your own risk…(and if you disagree, tell me why I’m wrong in the comments! I have an open mind 🙂 ) In my last post I wrote about 12 Influential Books Every…

This is a question that I get a lot, especially from co-workers or friends that are just beginning their journey as a software craftsman. What book should I read to become a better developer? Do I need to read books? I think it’s a great…

The more and more I talk to developers and other software engineers, I noticed that reoccurring theme. They all wanted to know the key to doing well in technical interviews. This is a good topic to understand because if you don’t take…

I recently was developing a web application and needed to incorporate a company logo image on the site. When asking the marketing department to send me an image of the company’s logo so that I may put the image on the site, they responded…

As a computer science enthusiast, it has sometimes been hard for me to find other social, out going geeks that just want to kick back and debate data structures, algorithm designs in terms of time and space complexity, sorting techniques,…

We’ve all heard of defensive driving (and if you haven’t, you’re probably the one we are all defending against). However, as developers, we should also be familiar with defensive coding. Just as defensive driving can save you lots of money…

C# is a wonderful language that has matured and evolved over the last 14 years. This is great for us developers because a mature language provides us with a plethora of language features that are at our disposal. However, with great power…

Hello! My name is Jason Roell. I am a software engineering consultant living in the great city of Cincinnati, Ohio. I am starting this blog as a site to write down some of my thoughts and experiences in software and technology. My hope is…