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This article argues for the value of example code for software projects. The primary audience are software engineers working on libraries and open-source code. Executable example code is probably the most valuable artifact one can add to projects ranging from single-purpose libraries to larger frameworks. This applies from the API design phase of a library to maintaining them in the long term. The repositories of the Android libraries that I maintain(ed) typically include dedicated sample apps....

This article describes a technique that helps to become productive in a large code base quickly. When mentoring other engineers, I found this to be a very effective and teachable approach. The primary audience are software engineers and engineering managers. When I joined larger organisations, the on-boarding usually involved some sort of starter task: add a new metric to the dashboard, allow people to add a website URL to their profile, … ....

This article explains an often-overlooked effect that can distort metrics during feature roll-out. The primary audience are software engineers and managers working on infrastructure and libraries. I want to motivate this problem with a fictive scenario: Alex wrote a replacement for an old and inefficient component in their app. It took the team a few weeks to implement and they carefully measured on test devices that it improves all core metrics....

This article explains advanced A/B test concepts. The primary audience are engineers encountering such A/B tests for the first time. A/B tests allow engineers to validate fixes, test for regressions, and measure improvements. In most situations the standard approach is to create a control and a test group of equal size (e.g. both 5%). Users within the test population (e.g. 10%) are then randomly assigned to one of these. However, sometimes more intricate methods can improve the user experience and make deployment safer and more effective....

This article discusses how long-term survival rate of internal software projects can be improved. The primary audience are senior software engineers and engineering managers working in medium to large organizations. When searching for “maintainable software”, many articles ([1], [2], [3]) focus on good coding practices. And certainly, good naming conventions, readable code, continuous integration, unit testing, … are all very important. However, I feel that many discussions implicitly assume a caring person who is motivated and capable to take care of the required maintenance indefinitely....