Tech Tips Digest: 1

Starting now! I'm gonna be posting blog articles elaborating more on the technology and development tips I'm posting over my LinkedIn and Twitter (@waleedmadanat) profiles.

Bear with me people, I might not be doing those blog articles as regularly as you might expect, it all depends on the amount of free time I get.

Now, let's get down to business..

Tech Tip No1: Read the API docs of the programming langs' you use, you'll be surprised by how much information is there

Among the common mistakes people make when using their language of choice, is not reading the bloody manual. Especially when upgrading to a newer version of the language.

Do you know if the class you're about to use is thread safe, or if the put method on the HashMap (Java) overwrites values in case of key collisions and so on.

Tech Tip No2: Pay attention to the style of your source code and save your team mates the misery of struggling to understand!

Software engineers work with teams most of the time and having a clear and standardized coding style that is reasonable and agreed upon among them makes their life much easier.

You should not be able to identify who wrote a line of code, except through perhaps documentation and version control history ;-)

Besides, having a standard code style enables you to apply bulk changes and quickly perform certain refactoring updates to the code through regular expressions available on most text editors and IDEs'.

Tech Tip No3: Documentation, always misused or neglected. Remember Tech Tip No1? Document your code and help others understand

Documentation as with code style is a very important part of the quality of your source code. Remember, you'll be spending most of the time in maintenance after you've delivered your system. So you might as well make that part of your system's life cycle a tiny bit easier.

Mind you, your source code should be written in a manner that is self explanatory while paying attention to adding proper documentation to the parts that are not as clear or easy to understand.

Also, since you might not be working alone, and it might also be the case where a new team mate has joined in and now wants to contribute code to the system. You might wanna make his life and yours easier, eliminating needless questions that could've been explained through the source code itself!

Tech Tip No4: Use the appropriate data structure for the problem you're solving, bad choices will bite you back painfully

Some people and out of bad habit stick to certain data structures never paying attention to the real problem. Do you really need a List? Well how about considering a Set for the problem at hand? I mean, Do you really wanna have redundant entries in your list?

You should always pay attention to the problem at hand and be careful with the choice of data structures you use to help you solve the problem.

Bad choices might mean bad memory utilization, and slower performance in some cases, depending on the size of data you’re gonna be working with.

Tech Tip No5: Don't be afraid to experiment & try out new ideas. This is not cardiac surgery, you're only killing CPU cycles!

I’ll end this post by asking you guys/gals out there to not be afraid to explore, experiment and try out new ideas! As I said in this Teck Tip, you’re not performing cardiac surgery. The only victims of such actions would be your time and CPU cycles ;-)

Stay tuned for the upcoming posts.