High distraction environment

Several times I saw someone on LinkedIn post something along the lines of: Why won’t they hire me, a senior engineer with 15 years of experience, for a position that requires language X, but I’ve written in languages Y and Z — don’t they know a true software engineer can learn languages quickly on the job? I have attempted to learn and write...

Dmitrii Kovanikov writes posts about enterprise software development and functional programming, both entertaining and serious. I never used a functional programming language (such as Haskell or OCaml) at work, but several ideas from functional programming have become popular in mainstream general-purpose programming languages such as Swift...

The CI pipeline takes an hour to run and it’s getting longer every month. There are five slightly different implementations of the same thing in the codebase. The docs for the network module were last updated two major versions ago. The project has a few thousand warnings. “It is what it is.” The project you work on may not be as bad as this, but...

I like to find things out to add them to my mental intuitive decision-making framework. These “factoids” bring more data points and evidence to the surface to strengthen the result. The big “but” is while learning new facts is enjoyable, the result is not as much improved as I’d like to believe. While the knowledge-gathering activity is useful...

Writing, for me, is a process ripe for distraction. As William Zinsser said in “On Writing Well”: A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing. I can testify from my newspaper days that the number of trips to the water cooler per reporter-hour far exceeds the body’s needs for fluids. Everyone deals with it differently. I like to...