Why do Formula 1 car pistons cost around 1,000 times the amount of a typical road car piston and what can this teach us about programming?

Tolerances: how formula 1 pistons can teach us to be better developers

There are a lot of different technologies out there. More than anyone could possibly explore. The de-facto position is to look for technologies that are popular, following the logic that “if enough people like it, it must be good”. In my experience, this isn’t always the case though.

3 popular technologies that I will strive to never use again

I’ve been reflecting on ‘what makes a good engineering assessment’, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a good assessment – as part of recruiting – should pay careful attention to three main things.

Creating challenges: three ways to improve the technical assessment

It’s no secret that testing is important. We rely on tests to describe intended behaviour, catch any subtle bugs and prevent regressions in our code. But why are tests always such a pain to write well?

Testing is important: three ways to easily improve test quality

The qualities we do look for are probably considered unusual compared to most software engineering outfits. Let's take a look at the three we use to ensure a good fit for working at Shamaazi.

Three unusual qualities we look for in developers

I hate the word ‘utility’. It says absolutely nothing. And yet, I come across it in so often when programming. It can take different guises too: ‘common’, ‘shared’, ‘lib’, ‘pkg’, ‘tools’, etc. These names can appear both as filenames or as directory names and drive me insane when they do.

Don't write utils; name carefully

Here are the three React Hooks I have found the most useful for producing websites in the cleanest, simplest way possible. They manage localStorage, sessionStorage, authentication and asynchronous tasks.

3 react hooks to keep your code organized neatly

I've written production code in a huge variety of languages, through Haskell, Scala, Go, Python, Java or JavaScript. Across all these, I noticed one significant trend: I pretty much never use the ELSE statement. Here's why.

Write better code and be a better programmer by avoiding else statements

Programming is all about communication. And yet, communication is a difficult thing to get right. Here's why it's so important, and how to communicate better.

Why communication is the key skill for being a great programmer

Programming can be an arduous activity. You have to remember what you are doing, the context and inner workings of a system, the building blocks of the language you are using. All while coming up with creative solutions to problems. All this can lead to COGNITIVE OVERLOAD. Luckily, there are some simple steps we can take to avoid this.

Avoid cognitive overload when programming in 4 simple ways

At Shamaazi, we found the existing Go libraries for logging overcomplicated and not neatly doing what we wanted. Instead, we wrote our own. Here's why.

We wrote our own go logger

I've continually made this same mistake with reference data. It's a mistake that's incredibly common, and easy to avoid. Here's the simple trick I've found.

A trick to help with reference data

A common mistake is to test every piece of code you write. This can be harmful and unnecessary. Let's explore why.

Doug Parsons(@dglsparsons)

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