Published inLevel Up Coding·Feb 21Avoiding Performance Killers in LoopsWhy? In his article Reflections on Software Performance, Nelson Elhage claims that “performance is a feature”. I’ve really come to appreciate that performance isn’t just some property of a tool independent from its functionality or its feature set. Performance — in particular, being notably fast — is a feature in and…Python6 min readPython6 min read
Published inCodeX·Feb 18Why You Need Coding StandardsOver the last six months I’ve chatted with engineering managers at dozens of companies — and something has started to stand out to me — the divide between teams that do and don’t have explicit code standards and guides that the whole team needs to be following. Of the teams…Code Quality7 min readCode Quality7 min read
Jan 26Interest Rates Are Rising: Calculating Tech Debt’s Actual ImpactInterest rates are rising 157%! No, I’m not talking about the Fed’s latest decision, but about the slowdown Fictional Inc. faced after releasing version 3.0 of their platform. Fortunately for them, the product release was incredibly successful and they’re starting to see revenue growth quickly picking up, but they now…Technical Debt11 min readTechnical Debt11 min read
Jan 23Code reviews need to shift-leftWe often talk about the idea of “shifting-left” for testing code and security analysis to speed up development and reduce risks further on the software engineering lifecycle. Moving testing and security analysis and improvements as early on in the development process as possible help to catch issues early and cut…Code Review5 min readCode Review5 min read
Mar 9, 2022How much information is too much information?The link between complexity, cognitive overloading, and velocity. — Typical measures of complexity in code are focused heavily on nesting and logical complexity, which are critically important, but they’re not the only factor we should be considering when we think about complexity and code quality. Consider the two functions below: def payroll(employee_database): for name, employee in…Software Development8 min readSoftware Development8 min read
Feb 9, 2022Is your code too complicated?Measuring complexity of your code with two different metrics — Cyclomatic Complexity & Cognitive Complexity — We’ve all been there. Taking a look at a repo that we can’t quite make heads or tails of. …Python10 min readPython10 min read
May 14, 2021Making lunch faster with Python concurrencyA lunchtime story to demonstrate threading, asyncio, multiprocessing & cloud functions Introduction I’m going to tell a story to explain the different concurrency and parallelism options in Python. In this story we will see how a single person multitasking is like concurrency, and multiple people doing their own tasks is like…Python14 min readPython14 min read
Mar 30, 2021How to set up a perfect Python projectWhen starting a new Python project, it is tempting to just dive in and start coding. Spending a tiny amount of time to set up a project with the best tools will save immense time and lead to a happier coding experience. In an ideal world, dependencies would be identical…Python7 min readPython7 min read
Mar 16, 20215 Refactoring Tips to Improve Your CodeRefactoring is the process of improving the quality of code without changing what it does. Taking a little bit of time to refactor your code before committing it can make it much more readable, which makes it easier to maintain. …Python8 min readPython8 min read
