Category: Opinion

Questions you should ask during an interview

Questions you should ask during an interview

You decided to apply for that position or mission and nailed the technical interview. They want you on board! That sounds great, but… before saying “yes” there might be a few questions you should ask and a few things to clarify.

Expressing intent using fluent code

Book with its story items coming alive

As professional developers, we constantly try to make our code readable for all to understand. We use the term “fluent code” to describe that line of thought. But beginners may find that a bit of an abstract notion… In this post I propose you to examine a concrete case I have recently encountered, and one solution for turning that bit of code into something I am proud(er) of.

OpenPGP: no, it’s not broken yet

A picture of a digital lock

You may have noticed: encryption has received some bad rap lately. I’m talking about Efail and SigSpoof of course, two flaws that impacted OpenPGP-based applications such as GnuPG, Enigmail, etc. Does it mean that OpenPGP is broken?

Designing software that protects people’s privacy

Software companies used to have one goal: to develop efficient applications that users liked. When people switched from desktop to SaaS / web applications, companies were forced to focus on security to avoid being hacked. Now they will have a new mission: to ensure the privacy of their users. At any costs.

Just say NO!

It’s 8 PM on a Saturday and you get a call from your project manager asking if you could quickly modify a project’s code and deploy it in production. You don’t feel okay about it? You’re absolutely right!

Scrum is the new death march

After years of developing software by (incorrectly) applying the Scrum methodology, I have come to this conclusion: Scrum is the new death march. Or rather, Scrum does more harm than good when it’s mindlessly requested by managers who are merely trying to show how modern and trendy their development teams are.

Before you Scrum, make sure your user stories are not epics

Scrum: this single word triggers heated debates, passionate evangelization and tales of horror stories. But whether you think it works or not, there is this one thing I’ve seen some Scrum adopters do, which defies the whole purpose of the methodology. And in my opinion, that is one of the factors that might lead to… epic failures!

Why code conventions, standards and best practices make us feel miserable

When a team of developers works on projects, they need to agree on code conventions, standards, best practices… Wait, do they have to? What are the developers giving up on in order to deliver uniformly-formatted code? In this post i defend the idea that code conventions and standards come with a high price, and that there might be a different way of working together.