Software Development, Finance and Economics

Backwards Compatibility Issues - a few ways to ensure that you do not run into them

You cannot afford to make Backwards Compatibility an after thought. As your system grows, and your user base grows, you are going to continually add new features and services, and some of them will require fundamental changes to your semantics and data structure. Given that, backwards compatibility can get rather challenging but there are steps you can take to mitigate potential issues.
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Native Mobile App - Design Patterns & Separation of concerns (Part 1)

(Part 1) Separation of concerns is important to keep your native mobile app modular and becomes especially important when your app integrates with 100s of APIs. You want to ensure that your app is resilient to changes to the API Spec. 
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Native Mobile App - Design Patterns & Separation of concerns (Part 2)

(Part 2) Separation of concerns is important to keep your native mobile app modular and becomes especially important when your app integrates with 100s of APIs. You want to ensure that your app is resilient to changes to the API Spec. 
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Databases & Denormalization - Faster queries for faster retrieval

Whether you are designing a NoSQL Database or a traditional RDBMS Database, one way to optimize to ensure faster retrieval is to denormalize but that's not the best (or even the first) solution. You want to try out a few other things before resorting to denormalization.
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Reusable UI components (React and beyond) - both presentational & functional

When building UI screens (on mobile apps) or pages (on web apps), you want to focus your energies on your specific business problems. What you don't want to do is spend time reinventing the wheel.
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Caching - What to Cache, and When to Cache (Part 3)

Caching is a broad topic (what isn't?). In this podcast, I've only tried to scratch the surface. How do you determine what to cache? And once you do, how do you go about it?
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Caching - Are you optimizing before identifying the problem? (Part 2)

If your pages take too long to render, caching may be a solution but before you go all out and start implementing or improving it, ask yourself if there are other fundamental problems that need addressing first (which led to the issues in the first place).
 
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When looking to make performance improvements, it is natural to look for that ”single” big problem. But, that’s hardly ever the case.

I've worked on making performance improvements across all tiers, and in a variety of ways within any given tier, during the course of my career and one thing I can say with a good degree of certainty is that it gets more challenging as you get closer to your goal. Reducing a page rendering time from 3 seconds to 1 second is a whole lot easier than reducing it to 900ms, then to 800ms, and then to 50ms!
 
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Keep your code DRY. As in, super DRY! Code duplication is a maintenance nightmare.

You have to make a conscious effort to keep your code base DRY. Every time you make a change, add a feature, or fix a bug, make an effort to find duplication and to determine design patterns. This will play a huge role in keeping your code DRY, and maintainable in the long run.
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Libraries vs Frameworks (based on my rather loose definition of it!) - What’s your preference?

Some of us prefer a framework that offers a lot more than what we might initially want, while others prefer a library that is small and simple but offers the barest minimum. Based on that simplified definition, what do you generally lean towards?
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