#Software-Development

Code reviews are essential for maintaining code quality and fostering team collaboration. While pair or team programming is often preferred for immediate feedback, asynchronous code reviews are a valuable alternative when real-time collaboration isn't feasible. This article explores the challenges of asynchronous code reviews, such as delayed feedback and less effective communication, and offers practical strategies to their effectiveness. Key recommendations include providing timely feedback, setting clear expectations, focusing on test coverage, staying curious, and using code reviews as learning opportunities. Adopting these practices can ensure high-quality code, promote knowledge sharing, and maintain a strong collaborative dynamic, even when working asynchronously.

This started as a rant, not meant to be published. But sticking to my "New Year's resolution" to write about what triggers me most, I decided to publish it anyway. I wanted to publish it as a LinkedIn post, but it got too long. So here is the unshortened, unpolished and authentic original version of this document, most of which I wrote on my phone after waking up on a Sunday at 5:45am. 😬

This article explores the use of local Large Language Models (LLMs) as coding companions during travel, offering insights into the practicality and performance of offline LLMs for software development tasks. I share my recent experience of using these tools while flying, addressing the challenges of coding without internet access and evaluating the effectiveness of LLMs in providing coding assistance and overcoming connectivity and privacy limitations.

Organizations often accumulate technical debt as the pressure to deliver customer value quickly increases, systems grow, and extending functionality the *right* way becomes more difficult.

Investing in developer experience leads to improved productivity, better engineering practices, and increased stakeholder satisfaction. Positive developer experience starts with providing access to technology and tools, fostering collaboration, and streamlining workflows. Create a comfortable work environment, offer training opportunities, and invest in your team's growth to achieve a motivated and productive development team.

Developer productivity is a crucial topic for high-performing software organizations. It becomes even more important when times get tough and the budgets are small.

Mapping the architecture of the system that you are building in your company, is a worthwhile activity. With a bit of preparation you can run successful architecture workshops in a remote setup.

DRY is one of the most misunderstood and abused principles. Copy more, reuse less!

Code ownership on a team-level can not only help to identify the team that has knowledge in a certain area, it also can serve as a signal for a mismatch between architecture and team structures.

Code ownership is an important topic when it comes to enabling your teams and allowing developers to improve the system while keeping the overhead of changes low. While today, most companies would (hopefully) agree, that individual code ownership is bad because it creates knowledge silos and makes the organisation dependent on individuals, code ownership still is essential on a larger scale.