With the pros and cons of each

The maturity of a software engineer is determined by many factors such as knowledge of algorithms, analytical thinking, big-picture focus, debugging skills etc. In addition, the following two factors are important from my point of view:

• A software engineer knows several approaches to solve the same problem.
• A software engineer chooses an approach based on an analysis of its pros and cons.

To help you get a little more mature, I’ve put together 5 ways to clone an object in C# and have prepared the pros and cons of each.

We are going…

Software development is about finding trade-offs:

• CAP theorem — developers need to choose just 2 out of 3 guarantees for software systems.
• Normalization vs denormalization of relational database schemas — developers find a balance between ease of data update and data retrieval time.
• Development speed vs high-quality coding — developers strive for high quality, which is a time-consuming exercise, while the business needs to have features ready as soon as possible.

High-performance C# code isn’t free either. Developers can sacrifice the maintainability or security of the code to make the code run faster. …

Working on real commercial projects helps software developers become professionals by acquiring practical knowledge. Developers, in addition to reading many books about, say, design patterns, need to understand how these patterns can be used to solve various problems in the real world.

Even the largest projects that developers work on often do not implement all existing approaches, patterns, and software engineering techniques. To learn as much as possible, a developer needs to work on multiple projects at the same time or change projects quite often. …

In the previous article, 5 Ways to Improve the Performance of C# Code for Free, in one of the examples, I measured the time difference between allocating a list of classes and allocating a list of structs.

Let’s remember that example:

The ListOfClassesTest and ListOfStructsTest methods are almost identical. The first method allocates a million of PointClass instances and add them to the list, while the second allocates a million of PointStruct instances and adds them to the list as well. …

Software developers often find it difficult to accurately estimate their work. There are quite a few factors that can affect the actual time to complete the task, which are difficult to know in advance in order to end up with the actual time close to the estimated one.

Software developers should find a good balance between underestimating and overestimating their work. If work is underestimated, developers may have to work under clients or managers pressure, starting from the point when the estimated time has expired, but the developers need more time to complete the task. …

I prefer to change the project I’m working on when I get bored and feel like I can’t grow anymore. But it was not always so.

At the beginning of my career, I spent almost two and a half years working on a legacy project with an old technology stack (ASP.NET WebForms, WCF…), despite the era of SPA, .NET Core, Docker and cloud technologies. I fixed bugs about 80–90% of the time, and spent the rest of the time working on feature development.

I felt like I needed to change that project after the first half of a year working…

String concatenation is a very simple operation that allows you to join multiple strings together. The usual way to do this is to use the ‘+’ operator:

string greeting = "Hello, " + "World!";

Additionally, there are several other ways to concatenate strings: using Join, Concat, Format methods of string class or using a StringBuilder class:

var sb = new StringBuilder();string greeting = sb.Append("Hello, ").Append("World!").ToString();

String concatenation is a simple thing, and every developer can write a compiled example without an IDE on a piece of paper.

But what about objects concatenation? Can this be done as elegantly as…

Each developer regularly performs code reviews of bug fixes as part of their day-to-day responsibilities. The process is simple and straightforward, but there are a few best practices that developers should remember and follow in order to develop a project with good code quality.

As a professional developer, do you ask yourself these questions when reviewing the bug fix of your teammate?

Is There a Change in the Unit Test?

Fixing the bug in the code should be accompanied by the addition or modification of the unit test.

A pull request that contains a code change to fix a bug but does not contain a change in unit…