18 Mar 2025 #career
What exactly does a C# backend software engineer do?
These days, I found this question on Reddit about the type of tasks we C# developers do:
“Do you find them exciting or just routine? Do they help you grow as a developer? Or is it mostly about finishing tasks quickly, making small adjustments, and moving on? Curious to hear your thoughts!”
It’s 8:45. Time for the daily meeting.
You join the meeting. “Good morning.”
Then you look through the window, scroll on Hacker News, and check your phone while you wait for your name.
“Yesterday, I worked on the task to yada, yada. No blockers.” Yes, another meeting that could be an update on Teams or Slack or an email.
It’s 9:15. Time for a coffee.
You pick your next ticket.
Another pair of REST endpoints to power a screen on the web application. You come up with request and response objects. And you contact the front-end developer to share those two objects, so nobody is blocked while the endpoints are ready.
You come up with validations, entities, and value objects to populate your core domain. Yes, you’re kind of doing DDD. Write some tests. Fire up your Postman and see if everything works.
That was the writing part.
Now, the reading part. The web application uses a grid with dynamic filters and ordering. It seems like a task for dynamic SQL. But you’re too lazy to write SQL queries by hand. It’s 2025 and the world has ORMs. Life is too short to write SQL queries by hand.
You need to pass a list of IDs to a query. You could use a string and send the IDs separated by commas. Passing a table type is the solution. But…Surprise, surprise, your ORM doesn’t seem to support tables as parameters.
Noon. It’s lunchtime.
You step away from the screen to grab some food and give your brain a rest. At least, that’s the plan. But you can’t stop thinking about your task. “Why it isn’t working? What am I missing?”
When you’re back from lunch, you pull down the source code of your ORM and go down a rabbit hole. There’s no way you’re writing SQL queries by hand. Not today. “Here it builds the SQL query from the mapping object…“ Great. Progress. But still nothing. You keep going down the rabbit hole, determined to find the answer.
One method leads to another. One break point here and there. Until finally, you find it. “Here it is. This ORM uses a converter to populate the underlying DbCommand object. I could use that.” The solution is kind of hacky, but it works.
You write a converter and a simple test to prove you’re right. Then you port that converter to your Database project and add some docstring comments to document your hacky solution.
It’s almost 5:00 PM.
You’re tired from that debugging session.
But it was rewarding. You proved that sometimes being lazy means being efficient. By the end of your debugging session, you know a bit more about the internals of your obscure ORM. You have a trick you’ll use in future tasks. And you have an idea for a good blog post.
It’s time to create a pull request.
You slap a title, a description, and some good comments here and there to explain what you found. You change your ticket status on JIRA and ping the default reviewer for this project.
Time to unplug from work.
It’s 8:45 the next day. Another daily meeting.
This time, you don’t scroll Hacker News, but go directly to your PR.
As usual, one reviewer is suggesting renaming a variable. And you forgot to cover one or two lines. Yes, the official guideline is 100% coverage. Arrggg!
Some of your coworkers find out the trick with the converter. For the first time in a while, you get a compliment in one of your PRs. Yay!
That’s just one ticket. There are more. Hopefully QA doesn’t find any issues in the search logic. Fingers crossed, all the issues are “move this label,” “this textbox isn’t green enough… .” Nothing you have to care about being a backend developer. Your UI is Postman, and everything is working fine from there.
Everything because you didn’t want to write SQL queries by hand. Lazy? Maybe. Clever? Absolutely.
That’s why you chose backend development: the satisfaction of solving tricky problems. And that’s just another day in the life of a random backend engineer. Based on true events, because backend development could be boring, and yes, sometimes, a little wild.
17 Mar 2025 #misc
Volume always wins.
When we start a new creative project (writing, coding, or painting), we aim to create something “perfect” on our first attempts. And we wait for perfection before we share our work with the world.
The truth is, those first attempts will be crap. Our first posts, programs, and paintings will be crap. Well, 90% of everything is crap.
But the more we practice, the better we become, and the closer to “perfect” we get.
That’s a lesson I learned when binge-reading Herbert Lui’s blog the other day. I read about the pottery class experiment. One half of a pottery class was graded on quality and the other half on quantity. At the end of the course, the half who went for quantity did better and got better grades. They focused on experimenting, learning, and improving along the way.
The more tries we do:
- We experiment more
- We become more confident
- We collect more data points
- We build a larger body of work
- We have more chances to succeed
- We understand our audience better
- We develop less aversion to failure
- We have more material to repurpose
- We gather more opportunities for feedback
- We create more points of contact with our audience
For your next creative project, go for volume: write 100 blog posts, write 100 short programs, or do 100 paintings. And don’t be afraid of showing your work. The more you create, the closer you get to “perfect.” Volume always wins.
16 Mar 2025 #misc
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Domain-Driven Design (DDD)? Entities and value objects?
These days, I came across this question on Reddit about DDD:
I’ve been struggling lately to understand the idea and the reason behind Domain Driven Design. However, I have come up with the understanding that DDD is just the implementation of the core domain in Rich-Domain models, creating a ubiquitous language to make technical development easier, bounded contexts and design patterns like aggregates, value objects, strongly typed IDs and so on.
It’s easy to confuse DDD with using entities and value objects. But that’s not the point.
At a past job, I had the chance to use DDD in small projects. Every two months or so, we started short projects to improve a hotel management software.
In most of those projects we used, and abused, DDD.
Here are two examples where we abused DDD:
#1. We used it on a CRUD application to text guests upon arrival. The project got behind schedule, in part due to forcing DDD on a project with a tight schedule. From that project, I learned some good lessons.
#2. In another project, slightly more complex, but still not business logic heavy, we followed DDD by the book. Almost literally we followed this book. We ended up with too many layers and mappings between layers just to read data from the database. Arrggg!
If we judge DDD by using entities, value objects, and aggregate roots, in these two examples, we did DDD. But we overengineered a solution that we could have simply done with an n-tier architecture or commands and queries.
DDD isn’t about aggregate roots, entities, and value objects.
DDD is about collaboration and understanding.
It’s about collaboration between stakeholders and developers to create a shared understanding of the business rules. And it’s about expressing that understanding in a shared language. From product people in user stories to developers, all the way through the code, and up to table and column names.
Aggregate roots, entities, and value objects are mechanisms to encapsulate that understanding inside boundaries in the code.
15 Mar 2025 #misc
“[Users] don’t care about your code—they care about results.”
That’s a controversial statement I found on this dev.to post. It got some virtual stones in the comments from “Clean Code” police officers. I used to be one too. I’ve changed my mind about it.
We don’t write code for the sake of writing code.
We write code to accomplish something for others:
Connecting them with loved ones in the case of Facebook, finding a romantic partner on Tinder, or getting a good and cheap room on Airbnb. Even for boring enterprise software, it’s about happier clients and more sales.
That’s what matters most to the users of Facebook, Tinder, Airbnb, and even boring enterprise software.
The other day, the VP of a software company I was contracting with taught me a lesson about Clean Code and other best practices:
“Clean Code is for us when we have to fix problems and deal with our own mess…users don’t care about that.”
It was a lesson I won’t forget, especially coming from a VP of a software company who had been a coder too.
We write code for humans. For two audiences: our future selves and end users.
Both audiences don’t necessarily intersect. Both audiences don’t care about the same things. For us and our future selves, it’s about maintaining code quality to add new features and solve bugs. For end users, connecting with loved ones, finding a romantic partner, getting a cheap room, and keeping clients happy and sales high. They care about what our code could do for them, not about the code by itself. Quality is there to support that mission.
14 Mar 2025 #career
I’ve stayed too long at stagnant jobs, and I regret it.
Staying too long at jobs cost me years and thousands of dollars. I left lots of money on the table. It made some of my skills get rusty.
But after connecting the dots, there were signs I failed to notice:
1. You’re not learning anything new
This is the #1 sign to look for. If your daily job becomes boring, that’s a sign. Or stay but diversify your source of joy.
2. There’s no room for growth
“You can build any role you want,” I was told.
That happened at a past job. I rejected the idea of being a team leader. I didn’t like how the role was designed at that place. It was a “wear all hats for the same pay” role.
And when I brought my ideas to the table, they got rejected with a “somebody else is already kind of doing that.” Staff Engineer? Software Architect? Right Hand? All of them.
It was a red flag I failed to notice.
3. It makes you sick
If your job makes you sick, physically or mentally, what other sign do you need? It’s time to take action. It’s time to run. Run, Forrest, run!
You can always get a new job, but not a new body.
4. You’re learning coping mechanisms
“OK, I just sent a message without a period at the end and without capitalizing the first letter,” my friend told me.
He was working from home and I stopped by for a coffee. In the middle of our conversation, he got a message from work and replied from his phone. There’s nothing wrong with that.
But to make sure his boss didn’t notice it, he didn’t add a period at the end of his message. Oh boy! I had just left that job no more than one year before that.
5. There’s no more money
The last time I heard “There’s no more money this year” when asking for a raise, the Hunger Games of layoffs started, until only a few ones were left standing.
I tried to convince myself I could stretch that job for another year or two. Wrooong! Eventually, layoffs knocked at my door too.
6. You have a bad boss
Often it’s hard to leave work stuff at work when going back home. A bad boss (whatever that means to you) will make you feel bad along with the people around you.
7. There’s no willingness to change
If after raising flags with your boss, you only hear “that’s fine. It used to be worse” or anything along those lines, that’s where change dies. Don’t waste more time bringing ideas.
Either you accept things the way they are or disagree with your feet.
8. It’s more important to find who to blame
If something goes wrong, it means there’s a flaw in a standard procedure or a process that let it happen. Finding who to blame only create a toxic work environment. Don’t waste time blaming. Fix the process.
From Brent Ozar, the SQL Server master, I learned that by the time we ask ourselves if we should leave, it’s too late. The best time to look for a job isn’t when you’re desperate. It’s when you don’t need one. Start updating your CV, reflect on what you truly want, and take control of your career. And don’t forget to read the fine print in job descriptions.