by veskoiliev | Jan 17, 2021 | Books
Deep Work by Cal Newport is a must-read for knowledge workers that struggle with focus, concentration and output. Even more nowadays, when COVID-19 imposed a work-from-home policy to many, forcing us to work from a generally distracting environment – our own homes. The book is written in a bit lengthy, but unambiguous and easy to read style. It doesn’t have any groundbreaking discoveries, yet the clear structure and intelligently gathered facts convey the point very effectively – Deep Work is needed for long-term success in many knowledge fields. (more…)
by veskoiliev | Nov 26, 2020 | Books
Atomic Habits by James Clear was recommended to me by so many people, and was so highly praised, that I was afraid my elevated expectations will leave me disappointed when I finally read it. This couldn’t be further from the truth! The book just resonated with me (and with lots of other people judging by the positive reviews in Amazon, Goodreads, etc). Style is clear and straight to the point. Action-packed read where I wanted to highlight half of the book as “important” to review later. Atomic Habits should definitely make your reading list for the coming months. (more…)
by veskoiliev | Jul 31, 2020 | Development
Every once in a while you might encounter a flaky unit test. I know, unit tests can’t be flaky by definition … but also life comes in the way, so sometimes it happens. Such a test will consistently pass on most developer machines, but fail in a CI environment every once in a while. In this post I’ll share how I go about fixing such problems.
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by veskoiliev | Mar 31, 2020 | Development
Most of the world is told to stay at home. Many IT companies are working remotely and are introducing changes / reduction in working agreements and hours. If anything, this has freed-up extra time for a lot of people. What better use of it than to sharpen your skills, catch-up on great learning materials and prepare for the rainbow coming after this storm virus? Here are some of the resources I can’t wait to indulge in this #StayHome April.
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by veskoiliev | Feb 28, 2020 | Development
I’m a firm believer in the practice of code reviews. When done correctly it can significantly improve the quality of software and is among the most effective knowledge-sharing tools in a team. In the previous article I shared a few tips how to create a great pull request. Following them as a team will make everyone’s life easier, so keep them in mind at all times. In this article, I’ll focus on effectively reviewing PRs.
TL;DR — Be nice! Your attitude and approach will be mirrored by your peers when they are reviewing your pull requests! Remember the common goal of your team – to achieve business value while writing great code you will be proud of.
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by veskoiliev | Jan 31, 2020 | Development
Great things are usually built by teams, not by lone wolves. The myth about the 10x developer sitting alone in the basement is often exaggerated. In practice we’re usually working in a team, building (hopefully) great things together. Aside from the code we write, how we collaborate with others, our work ethic and ways of working have big impact on the success of a project.
The code review practice is widely adopted for increasing overall code quality and decreasing number of bugs that reach the QA team / end user. On top of these, I believe reviewing and discussing code written by your peers is the best way to share knowledge within the team, to onboard new members faster and to quickly adopt new patterns as a group.
Below are my top tips for being a great team-player, making your pull requests easier to read and understand so they can get approved as fast as possible.
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by veskoiliev | Dec 31, 2019 | Books
With New Year’s Eve just hours away, what better time to talk about goals, motivation and personal development.
I’ve read countless books on these topics over the years. Not necessary for the “action steps” they give to better your life immediately, but for the reflection questions they often pose. Without a doubt Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins is my new favorite. It’s a great blend between reflection, adversity, challenges, motivation, gratefulness.
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by veskoiliev | Nov 24, 2019 | Development
Having a side project (often called a “pet project” or “side hussle”) is a great way for every software engineer to improve existing skills or learn new technologies altogether. It provides a safe environment where you can experiment freely and iterate faster. You’re not bound by other people’s requirements so you can try this new cool-looking library still in “alpha” stage. Of course no one (except you) will be upset if things go wrong and everything breaks.
Following are a few tips to make the most of your side project and learn as fast as possible. If you don’t have a pet project yet these will serve as a guideline how to start one.
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by veskoiliev | Jul 1, 2018 | Android, Development
RxJava has been gaining popularity in the past couple of years and today is widely adopted in the Android community. So much in fact that I can’t recall an Android developer interview in the past 3 years that doesn’t mention RxJava.
Here is a short list of the most common interview questions I have asked candidates (or been asked as an interviewee). Answers to all questions can be found further down.
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by veskoiliev | Jun 23, 2018 | Android, Development
Jacoco is a widely used library to measure test code-coverage in JVM-based projects. Setting it up for Android applications has a few quirks and having multiple flavours, using Kotlin and writing (some) tests in Robolectric makes it even tricker. There are already great tutorials in how to set it up, like THIS and THIS one. In this post however I’ll not only give you a ready solution, but share all details how I got to it – this way you’ll be able to adapt it in the best way for your project.
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