Just don’t go overboard — Spring Profiles are a core — and very useful — feature of the Spring Framework. Many Java projects make use of them to load different config values for different environments (e.g. dev, stage, and production). In reality, they can be used for so much more. …

Any good pattern can become an anti-pattern — The success of open source software has given rise to a similar practice known as inner sourcing. The term — coined by Tim O’Reilly — describes the effort to help companies leverage open source development practices within their internal software development. While open sourcing involves disparate engineers contributing to publicly-available…

It involved Ayn Rand, a sailboat, and a lot of driving — Clearing out some old emails the other day, I came across one that brought back some odd memories. The email — nearly a decade old at this point — was an invitation to interview with a startup. At the time, I wasn’t looking to join a startup. But I was…

Sometimes, even best practices can be made better — Anyone who reads my stuff knows that I have strong ideas on best practices for forming engineering teams. And they probably know that these best practices center around some core themes: Teams should be formed with autonomy in mind — inter-team dependencies should be minimized Teams should be formed vertically…

Or don’t. Either way, here’s how. — Once upon a time, my team inherited a Typescript service. Soon afterward, the team’s on-call engineer (me, as it turns out) was paged by an alert. This alert was triggered by a line in the service’s error logs. …

A semi-serious approach to examining our work environments — Moana is a 2016 animated Disney film. It opens in Motunui, a semi-fictional Polynesian island and village. At the movie’s start, the people of Motunui are pretty much homebodies, as the chief has forbidden anyone from venturing beyond the island’s reef. …

If nothing else, please heed #2! — Medium is filled with articles that are, in turn, filled with important life lessons. Lessons that the author has learned over the years. Lessons that, when followed, promise to have a profoundly positive effect on the readers’ lives. I myself have learned a lot over years of experience. And one…

Hate your organization instead — If you’ve been an engineer at an appreciably-sized org, then you’ve certainly experienced this scenario: You belong to a team that owns some number of applications or services. Since your team designed and developed them, you know them inside and out. …

The answer is ”as soon as your entity is created“… but is it really that simple? — Awhile back, a colleague and I were discussing the technical design of an application that we were building. In this context, our rich client was generating a piece of data and posting it through a ReST API. This data represented a discrete entity; as such, it needed to be assigned…