I don't think that in principle any quadrant is more important than others, I just think it's a useful mental tool to have. In some education and some industries, they perhaps put too much weight on some of these quadrants,. Whereas I think in principle they're all equally important. So let's go through maybe one by one, starting with speed or time efficiency. And if you check the book, you'll see that if you use a more specialized data structure, which is based on trees, then you can be up to two orders of magnitude speed when building software.
“Seriously good software is not just software that works. It is not just software that satisfies its functional requirements, so it does the right thing, but it also does it in the right way."
Marco Faella is an associate professor at the University of Naples Federico II and the author of “Seriously Good Software”. In this episode, Marco explained what he means by seriously good software, looking at software quality from multiple different perspectives. We then dived deep into several of those software qualities with some practical tips on how software engineers can improve their craft to produce high-quality software. Towards the end, we also touched on the concept of minimum viable code, why it is important to have an idea of what the ideal code looks like, while still being practical in finding the right compromise.
Listen out for:
- Career Journey - [00:05:00]
- Role of Education for Software Engineers - [00:07:18]
- Seriously Good Software - [00:12:02]
- Software Quality Quadrants - [00:17:15]
- Speed and Time Efficiency - [00:20:23]
- Space and Memory Efficiency - [00:24:10]
- Reliability Through Monitoring - [00:26:54]
- Invariants - [00:32:11]
- Reliability Through Testing - [00:33:43]
- Readability - [00:36:15]
- Reusability - [00:39:25]
- Thread-Safety - [00:41:17]
- Minimum Viable Code - [00:46:29]
- 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:48:44]
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Marco Faella’s Bio
Marco Faella is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. Besides his research on theoretical computer science, Marco is a passionate teacher and programmer. For the last 13 years he has been teaching classes on advanced programming and has published a Java certification manual and a video course on Java streams. More recently, Marco has released his book titled “Seriously Good Software” that teaches techniques for writing high quality software.
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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/52.
