SivaLabs

I worked at different types of IT organizations including small 20 people company, world’s largest bank, start-ups etc. Working at a service based company is both very interesting and at times frustrating depending on the client. On the positive side you get to work on different types of domains/applications, different tech stacks, and you may get to learn variety of organizational cultures. On the downside you may end up working with “Typical traditional enterprise organizations” which makes you question your career choices!!!

I would like to share how was my year 2020 and what I am planning to do in 2021. As we all know 2020 was a rough year due to COVID-19, lockdown and all, but 2020 is a good year for me in many ways. It used to take minimum 2 to 3 hours of daily commute for office, now that I have been working from home I am able to use that time for other activities.

In Java world, Hibernate/JPA is the most popular ORM framework. Also, JPA/Hibernate is a very controversial topic because some people don’t like it at all. It is very understandable though.

Many people start using JPA/Hibernate with minimal knowledge and keep adding logic (read as “annotations”) as and when required to get the job done. While checking the overall application performance, most of the time people realize it’s because of poor performance of persistence layer.

If you know me you know that I am a big fan of Spring ecosystem. I have been using Spring framework since 2007, and I am pretty familiar with many of its features.

Even if we are familiar with some technology once in a while we get stuck with small issues and end up spending hours and hours figuring out why something is not working as expected.

When I observe old people I notice one interesting thing. They don’t usually react aggressively like teenagers do. Even when they have to deal with difficulties in life they deal with it calmly. Even when some people undermine them they simply give a smile and move on rather than trying to prove they are wrong. I wonder is growing older makes them wise?

If you ever worked on a large project which doesn’t have any tests then you know how painful it is to work on such codebase.

You know what is more painful? Working on a project which has plenty of USELESS tests written for the sake of passing minimum code coverage requirement.

I was working on a SpringBoot application which is planned to deploy on AWS and, we were using S3, SQS and RDS services.

LocalStack provides an easy-to-use test/mocking framework for developing AWS based Cloud applications.

Nowadays software development is a challenging task as the number of programming languages, frameworks, libraries are increasing rapidly day by day. Luckily, the number of resources to learn on the internet for free also increased a lot. There are a ton of free resources to learn almost everything on the internet. There are lots of official documentation, blog posts, Udemy courses, YouTube videos etc.

Gone are the days we can call ourselves as Java developer, .NET developer, Python developer etc. Nowadays we might need to work with multiple languages to some extent such as Python for scripting, Go for CLI utilities etc.

Out of personal interest I started learning Go Language 3 months ago and I am using Go for our current application. In this article I would like to share my first impression on Go language.

As software developers, most of us implicitly assume gaining strong technical skills might make us successful. Many of us assume being good at cutting edge technologies, mastering keyboard shortcuts, being able to work on front-end, back-end and infrastructure etc etc will make us successful in our careers.

Yes, the above mentioned skills definitely help, but just being good at tech skills might not make us successful. There is more to it.