Forget Writing Code.

Start Building Software.

New developers mistakenly believe software development is all about for loops and if statements. These are the fundamentals of writing code, but they’re only a small part of building software. I’ve mostly worked with Java and it always confuses me when people describe other languages as “faster to write” than Java. Do a few less characters make any difference? After working multiple Java jobs, I realised that what slows down delivering new features isn’t how fast you can write code....

I spent the last few years jumping between obsessions. First it was a software build tool. Then it was a cloud computing provider. Now it’s building my own web apps. I thought there was something wrong with me. Each obsession reached a peak, then something else stole my attention. Each time, I felt bad because I hadn’t become an “expert” in the topic before moving on. Now my perspective has changed....

Writing a book is daunting enough, but the thought of putting in so much effort only to sell zero copies is even more terrifying. Although I had a topic in mind, I wasn’t sure if anyone else would be interested in it. After 13 years working in software, I knew that many developers lacked critical internet knowledge, which often held them back in interviews and stunted their career growth. The question was: if I wrote a book to solve this problem, would anyone actually care?...

Some companies want you to believe A/B testing is so complicated that you should never consider setting it up yourself. Just pay a fixed monthly fee and leave it to the experts. They couldn’t be more wrong. Setting up basic A/B testing in AWS is possible for anyone who tinkers with cloud services and can write simple scripts. This solution doesn’t have a polished web UI or deliver results by email, but it does answer one important question....

For the longest time backend Java developers only ran code on web servers. Web servers are the glue between the outside world and your application. They pass incoming network requests to your code to do some work and return a response — like handling REST API calls made by most modern web apps. Web servers are predictable, reliable, but deeply flawed. As traffic increases, you need to manually scale up the number of web servers....

Spring Boot has 50+ libraries available to add to your application. With so much functionality, how do you know you’re not missing critical features that could avoid hours of wasted development? My answer was to spend way too long browsing official docs. But after a few years I did uncover some hidden gems my colleagues never knew existed. Here are my favourites to help you save time and eliminate unnecessary code....

For any keen developer, every time they run the build process they’re itching to get coding again. But slow builds put the brakes on your ability to deliver more features. When the only feedback you get from the build process is its status and duration, how can you even begin to think about optimising it? Well, if you use Gradle to build Java code you’re in luck. There’s a way to profile your build process to get key insights into what’s going on internally—a bit like debugging or JVM profiling tools....

When working with slow tests, parallelising them is the first step towards faster builds.

Don’t waste any more time waiting for tests to run locally by implementing this quick build script fix.