About four months ago we decided to use Trello as our task management tool for our team at Clean Kitchen. It has been really awesome experience using it so far. In the past I have used different kinds of issue tracking solutions. I still believe that for a co-located team…

One of the main ideas of Domain Driven Design is building a shared domain language called ubiquitous language. Typically you do it by listening to the domain experts and capturing the language they use. …

Nowadays microservices are so popular that it is inevitable they are used in places where they should not. Microservices is a pattern that has 2 main drivers: optimising for team size and system load. However, often they are used out of fear of monolith. …

Have you noticed that sometimes you need to write a lot of test code only to verify some very specific part of production logic? When I come across this myself my first reaction is to hide all these uninteresting details. For example, by introducing factory methods or builders in test…

The term legacy is used quite broadly in software engineering. Typically it’s used to refer to a system or technology any reasonable person should avoid as much as possible. However, if we go deeper into trying to understand what legacy in software means we can uncover some more interesting insights. Legacy as value …

The biggest problem with ticket management systems like Jira is that they are too powerful. Having a backlog of 300+ items is no problem. Whenever some new topic is raised we always have an answer — “let’s create a ticket”. And then forget about it. With 300+ items on the…

As a parent I often face the challenge of having to explain the hidden dangers of unhealthy life habits. Interestingly, I have realised that the way we tend to treat our own health and the health of our software have a lot in common. Eating unhealthy food and no regular…

Previously I wrote about avoiding nulls using NullObject and Optional method return value. In this post I will focus on modelling optionality in an object internal state in cases where NullObject is not suitable. …

Let’s say we want to implement a service that handles the process of placing an order. This order goes through multiple stages during its lifetime. Initially it is pending, then goes to confirmed and paid. Finally it ends up as either completed or canceled. Now going to implementation it seems…