Learn Computer Science
Learn how to write maintainable, readable, clean code. The same algorithm can be written in many different ways. Learn to write code in such a way that your co-workers love to work with you on projects!
Functional programming is a way to writing code where programs are created strictly through functions. Functional programming has gained quite a bit of traction in recent years among the development community, mostly because of the benefits it provides. Functional programming is a declarative way to write provably correct code. Function definitions are expressions that simply map inputs to outputs, rather than a … Read more
Clean code is like clean garbage – it’s only clean if it doesn’t exist. In other words, the only clean code is no code. Let’s start with an acknowledgment that a perfectly clean (empty) codebase is useless. With that in mind, our pursuit of clean code will necessarily consist of tradeoffs. We’ll trade usefulness for … Read more
Unit tests are unbelievably important to us as developers because they allow us to demonstrate the correctness of the code we’ve written. More importantly, unit tests allow us to make updates to our code base with the confidence that we haven’t broken anything. In our eagerness to get 100% code coverage, however, we often write … Read more
I often hear that we need more and better comments in the code we write. In my experience at previous companies as well as at Qvault, we often need better comments, we rarely need more, and often we need less. Before you crucify me for my sacrilege, let me explain. #1 – Incorrect Comments Incorrect … Read more
Constants can be confusing and easy to misuse in Go if you are coming from an untyped language. Let’s take a look at some of the nuanced details of how they work in Go. It’s probably unsurprising, but Go’s constants are almost nothing like JavaScript’s bastardized version of the concept. Go vs JavaScript Many programming … Read more
Writing technical documents like API or architectural documentation which exceeds a simple flow diagram can be a daunting task. If you have some experience with technical documents, you will probably agree that there is nothing more frustrating than bad documentation. Lately, technical writing has become a more important part of my job, so I put … Read more
Pure functions are often hyped up in the JavaScript world, probably because of the abundance of stateful front end applications. While pure functions have their downsides (i.e. inconvenience, potentially large argument lists), they should be used as much as reasonably possible. We’ve made a lot of changes in the Qvault app codebase recently to use … Read more
One of the first concepts new developers learn is the if/else statement. If/else statements are the most common way to execute conditional logic. However, complex and nested if/else statements can quickly become a cognitive burden and compromise the readability of a program. Guard Clauses Guard Clauses leverage the ability to return early from a function … Read more
In Go, we often need to return zero values. Idiomatic Go encourages the use of guard clauses, and guard clauses necessitate the need to return early. When returning early with an error, by convention all other return values should be zero values. The confusion arises with data types like maps and slices. Should maps and … Read more
My team at Qvault has been spending less of our “free” time working on bugs and features from the backlog, and more time refactoring our codebases and test suites. As a result, and perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, we’ve noticed a significant increase in our throughput of features and bug fixes. As it turns out, its easy … Read more