I’ve had a go recently at looking at Spring Boot OAuth2 and how easy it is implementing a sign in with Microsoft using OAUTH2. My findings were surprising and justified I think this blog post. More importantly I think it explains why Microsoft has such little “pull” with developers nowadays. (Sure they are trying to […]
The problem with calendars nowadays
I find myself stuck to my phone nowadays — it’s a necessary evil that helps me keep on top of my work through a plethora of apps which are no longer a help but rather a necessity. There’s email, Slack, Github, Okta, Google Docs, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Zoom, SMS and the list goes on. Amongst these, […]
Experience or institutional knowledge?
These 2 things are often confused in our industry: experience and institutional knowledge. Too often I see companies evaluating engineers based on the fact they know where to go and make changes quickly and put out fires, rather than looking at the impact long term an individual has, on the platform, on its stability, on […]
Working with senior engineers
This is another topic that I often get asked about when I advise companies. It often comes packaged in the format “what do I need to do to attract more senior engineers?” but the core of it is the same: how do you work with senior engineers? As an engineer myself and having worked throughout […]
Polyglot or poly-framework?
Our Universe is expanding every day — and I mean this in the sense of our “programming universe” (though the other, ad literam interpretation is true as well, since our actual physical Universe is expanding indeed). Every meetup and every website I come across advocates a new framework, a new architecture, a new language, a […]
What makes a good CTO?
I have been a CTO myself a few times and worked for some of the greats (and learned!) so I get asked often about what are the traits of a good CTO, be it by the companies I’m advising privately and also through Endeavor mentorship sessions. If you are a co-founder looking for a CTO […]
I’m a senior engineer and I want a promotion!
This is something that comes up often in sessions through the Endeavor network or with companies I advise so I thought it worth a blog post. Imagine a situation where you have a startup, you are in the right place and have the right skillset to scale this up, you build up your engineering team […]
How to read version number and other details from Java manifest
One of the challenges I have seen teams struggle with nowadays is versioning their packages. One of the problems with adopting any versioning system is that typically you have to version (at least) 2 components: the binary you are releasing AND the source code, at the time you have built the software. Doing this allows […]
Adding Apache Commons CLI to your Java Project
I’ve spent enough time dealing with Java programs to see enough ETL’s and other sorts of command-line based apps implemented in Java. And with these sort of programs came with the realization that more often than not developers opt for the “easy” way out and end up implementing command-line parsing by themselves. This seem to […]
Confessions of a software engineer: things I do
I confess finally to things I do as a software engineering who has been working in ad-tech for over 12 years now. I confess to actually doing (as in implementing systems who do) all of the things below