Recently, I finished an excellent cooperation gig with a client. While my main tasks were focused on helping them design and develop their digital service, I wouldn't be a great consultant if I would just silently fade away on the last day of my contract. One technique of ensuring my work and I will be remembered is giving back profess...

Every year, Futurice hosts a ceremony called FutuAwards with several excellent awards: – People Person Award for recognising the efforts made to make a co-worker feel cared for, welcomed and accepted at work. – Tunkki Award, aka Keep the Jack, for a team that has gone through some dark times but lived to see the light at the end of the...

Hello! A quick post for Friday and for your convenience. I recently visited the Webbidevaus podcast hosted by Antti Mattila and Tommi Pääkkö speaking about my background and experiences in pair & ensemble programming. Unfortunately for my English speaking readers, the podcast is entirely in Finnish, so you might need to feed the audio ...

Are your end-to-end UI test suites flaky and taking a long time to run? Perhaps you are suffering from a combinatorial edge-case explosion. Many developers are most comfortable writing end-to-end tests because the system behaviour from outside is easy to figure out. For example, within a test, you open a page, type into a text input, c...

This week I found out that a developer decided to apply to Futurice using this charming message: “"I follow Niko Heikkilä on LinkedIn, and I appreciate his social media presence, tone and content. So, I'm here."” Well, you know who you are, so thank you for that! It's one of the greatest compliments a software engineer can receive when...

Imagine a hypothetical scenario where a customer walks into a store, and the following discussion takes place. “Customer: "Hi! I'd like to buy the <product>." Clerk: "Mmm, sure thing, but you have to give me two weeks and we'll ship it to you when our next delivery is due." Customer: "But there's at least ten same products on that shel...

So, you have found a new shining toy — a cloud development toolkit, state management library, REST framework, or even a new language paradigm — and you're enthusiastic about learning it. Someone on Reddit claimed it would solve all the past problems you've ever had. Great! By all means, assess it in a personal side project. On the othe...

A long-running Mastodon instance (mastodon.technology), of which I was a member from 2018 to this day, has decided to shut itself down. Hence, I migrated my account to Fosstodon, which seemed the next best thing. It also got me thinking again about how perishable online services are. Especially those unthankfully maintained by a single...

Effective teams are made stronger by nurturing safe environments where people can become vulnerable. No vulnerability, no psychological safety. No psychological safety, no experimentation of new ideas. No new experiments, no continuous improvement. No continuous improvement, no mastery. No mastery, no purpose, nor motivation. No motiva...

I've recently participated in discussions related to developer productivity. I think productivity is harmful because it can fool us into thinking high-frequency outputs are more desirable than high-quality outcomes. Productive developers may write 500 or more lines to a feature branch in hours, open pull requests for reviewing the chan...

Recently, I had a discussion with my team regarding an always timely question: at what level should I write my automated tests: unit, integration, or end-to-end? My initial advice has been to follow the Practical Test Pyramid, which dictates that you should write mostly unit tests, fewer integration tests, and least of all, end-to-end ...

My team and I have been practising mob programming daily for six months. During this time, we have grown from three individual specialists to a team of four full-stack developers and learned to overcome the myriad of challenges presented by our client's business domain. I wrote about our adventures, learnings, and obstacles in mob prog...

In software development, there's a lot of talk about small vs big batches. However, that talk mostly comes from the Lean methodologies perspective, which, while essential to learn, is not digestible for all. How do you practice small batches — micro-commits — as part of your daily workflow? Let me show you. “If you'd rather skip straig...

Few rules in designing clean code have been as crucial for me as Kent Beck's four rules of simple design. To jog your memory, they are as follows: Well-designed code… • passes the tests • reveals intention • has no duplication • contains the fewest elements How do I use them? First and foremost, I need to get to a state where my code i...

Recently, on LinkedIn, I shared my unapologetic opinion that you're not a professional software developer if you don't care to write automated tests to verify your code. Some people took this into their hearts and decided to call me out as a gatekeeper, actively seeking to harm the industry. Remember that I said nothing about fresh dev...

It happened once upon a time, during the code review… Developer: "Hey, could you review my PR? I had this fantastic idea about X the other day, so I decided to give it a go. I think it turned out to be pretty good. What do you think?" Reviewer: "Ehm, but that's not what we had planned. Did you design this by yourself? Did you stop and ...

There is one thing uniting the people working in tech. Computers. Fresh from the box, many of them are happily unequipped to fulfil our grand visions and desires. Whether it be the ecological disaster caused by chasing after fancy new hardware, receiving authorized devices for client work, or switching laptops due to expiring leases, w...

During a mentoring session, I was recently asked for tips on how to keep up with the tech world. There are too many places to mention, but I'll list a few here: GitHub Explore can offer you many suggested packages based on the GitHub repositories you've browsed. The algorithm works surprisingly well and learns about your habits to impr...

The promise on DevTernity 2021 homepage is to turn developers into architects and engineering leaders. A bold mission, which many major players in the thought leadership business would find a formidable challenge to overcome. Then again, they advertise to be in the top 3 among international software development conferences, so perhaps ...

While dipping our toes with test-driven development for the first time, a significant obstacle is usually finding out how to write our first tests. Happy cases are easy to start with, but a better way involves mapping your inputs to expected outputs—watch out, ZOMBIES! No, I mean for real. ZOMBIES testing pattern was introduced by Jame...

In the modern world struck by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity we are still pushed to estimate our work accurately. Some say estimating is stressful and counter-productive. Some say it's essential for tracking the team's progress. There is an alternative parallel universe way of working, forcing you to refine and spli...

Lately, I've been investing more time in Python projects. However, having worked with Node.js and TypeScript for the better part of the last few years, I instantly began to miss the comforts provided by the Node ecosystem, namely the fantastic Yarn package manager. Python ecosystem has had its fair share of package management solutions...

Once upon a time, two software companies were competing in the same business domain. The first one has been out of business for a while now. The latter one thrives. Long Time Ago in a Software Company, Far Far Away... The product management learns about a speculative need for the Feature that will help the company increase their cash f...

Wishing you a merry winter solstice and related celebrations in your local culture! Today we Finns also celebrate our 104th year of independence. While I'm not the one to spread nationalist chants, I'm fortunate to live in a country that has enabled me to grow professionally in a multi-cultural environment. Next Friday, I will be atten...

Oh, hi! How is your November going? 🍂 Lately, I've been busy moving from one project to another. I've recently finished a short consulting gig where I helped my team build a cloud-based publishing platform using AWS Cloud Development Kit. I will write more of my experiences with CDK to my blog at a later date. I updated my blog to Gats...

This week we had some leisure time with my Futurice team playing escape room games. Surprisingly, I enjoyed not participating in the play but observing how we solved the different puzzles together. This led me to a revelation: what I saw was us doing swarming/mobbing with a WIP limit of 1, which is a recommended workflow in nearly all ...

Oh, hi! How is your September going? I've been reading again. I'm drafting this post with the Day One app, which I migrated to from Notion. I also tried Emacs' Org Mode for bullet journaling, but simplicity always wins. The Human Side of Elixir I've been studying Elixir programming language and its tooling occasionally, but somehow I n...

Hello, reader! 👋 For the last few weeks, I've been recovering from surgery. Fortunately, it hasn't limited my daily life that much. The operation itself was short and affordable because my employer's health insurance entirely covered it. Healthcare is what matters most should I feel the need to relocate to some other country. As is the...

It seems that the summer heatwaves have paused so I can once again focus on writing. So here are a couple of good picks I've read and watched while lying in a hammock drinking mineral water. 😎 The fabulous Mob Mentality Show ran a short episode about using mob programming in interviews. It turns out this approach has been familiar to m...

I'm writing this just before leaving on a vacation trip. Expect one or more entries during July, though! I started reading the new Dave Farley book, Continous Delivery Pipelines. Remembering how much I liked the Continuous Delivery book, it's likely I'll reference some nuggets of wisdom from this one in later posts. I was nodding hard ...