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Insights

This section explains insights gained during the course of my software development career.

Would you describe yourself as a high quality coder? Why?​

I believe that a high quality coder should strive to have a good understanding of the problem domain and requirements. Furthermore, problem solving and critical thinking skills are vital to evaluate a range of architectural solutions.

To this end, I have collaborated with my peers, users and management at all levels. This enabled me to analyse requirements and understand the nature of the application problem. Furthermore, this has also involved reading and analysing business information from a variety of requirements and technical specification documents.

During the course of my career, I have produced code that possess the following traits:

  • Self documenting and simple to understand.
  • Behaves as expected.
  • Clearly reports error messages.
  • Adheres to style guidelines.

Subsequently, I have implemented high quality code by adopting the following principles:

  • Use git hooks to apply automated linting and style formatting. I have used the following tools to achieve this during the course of my career: flake8, black and pre-commit. By adopting this principle I have produced clear and consistent code.
  • I have created and maintained README documentation. This provides an overview of the architecture and explains how to configure, build and install the software. When implementing APIs I have used swagger tools to self document code, using comments and endpoint specification parameters.
  • I have designed and implemented automated unit, integration and end-to-end tests that exceed test coverage metrics. My development portfolio highlights the use of a variety of testing frameworks, including: Pytest, XUnit, NUnit and Jest. Furthermore, I have used docker and docker-compose to provide replicable external dependencies when testing. Examples include databases and message queues.
  • I have made pull requests for code reviews to gain feedback from my peers. Based on feedback, I have updated my source code and documentation before merging into development and production branches for release. Similarly, I have also performed code reviews on the behalf of my peers.
  • I have designed and implemented Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines using GitHub Actions and GitLab CI. These pipelines build, test and release versioned software and documentation to development and production environments. This allows building and testing software in a replicable remote environment before deployment.

In summary, I believe that a good quality coder should perform multiple roles including analysis, testing, coding and deployment.

Do you have any thoughts on how open-source software projects should be managed, to be successful?​

Open source projects are remotely distributed with contributions from a wide variety of international developers and users. Subsequently, it is especially important to establish best practices for managing communication and procedures. Examples are:

  • Establish a project maintainer to oversee the project, triage bugs and document processes and guidelines etc.
  • Establish a developer road map to give an overview of the technical objectives.
  • Include a code of conduct document to establish acceptable behaviour, procedures and guidelines.
  • Include a readme file with a project overview, incorporating an explanatory guide for features, installation and configuration.
  • Maintain change logs to summarise product evolution, documenting bug fixes and breaking changes.
  • Provide documentation that explains how to report a security vulnerability.
  • Create templates for raising issues and pull requests.
  • Establish and document contribution guidelines. These should explain how contributions are reviewed, the type of contributions accepted, the expected response time and priority of issues for which contributions are accepted.
  • Support guidelines that detail how the project is maintained. This includes details for how to report bugs and raise feature requests. Furthermore, links to community groups and forums should be included.
  • Provide a website for documentation that contains a landing page with sections for guidelines, categorised into how-to guides, tutorials, reference documentation and explanatory materials. This acts as a clear entry point for the project.