Premature infrastructure is a peculiar behavior pattern that I witnessed in every single tech company I worked for. It is the habit of creating infrastructure code before it is actually needed. The development team is predicting future requirements and preparing ahead of time. That might be preparation for a future feature, extension capabilities that aren’t needed yet, or customization that may or may not be wanted. I believe that creating premature infrastructures is one of the biggest problems in software development.

Do you ever feel like a million tasks are looming over you at any given moment? How about that you can’t concentrate because it feels like you should be doing something more important? I used to have these feelings all the time. I call this “brain clutter”, though I’m sure there are many other names for it. That’s a problem that hurts work productivity more than you might realize. Not to mention your peace of mind.

The more I work in software development, the more I love working with the command line. I notice I’m becoming increasingly productive with it. When dealing with Git, for example, I used to do almost everything in a GUI program, whereas now I use the command line for 90% of the actions. But the command line will make you more productive with everything, not just source control. There are several reasons why it’s so efficient.

We all know the value of debugging. Inspecting the values of variables, seeing the call stack, and moving step-by-step are all features that are priceless for developers. But it’s not always simple to get a debugging session going in real-world scenarios. Sometimes, you can’t get the debugger working. Or you’re starting the program from the command line and want to debug from the very start. Perhaps there’s a crash as soon as the app starts.

Steve Jobs was a genius product guy. I think few would say otherwise about the man behind the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. But given a different turn of events, say if he was born 30 years later and decided to become a software engineer, how would he manage? Do you think he’d reach similar greatness as he did in Apple? If you read Steve Job’s biography or saw the movie Jobs , then you’d know Steve had some special personality traits.

I don’t know about you, but I hate using the mouse. The entire concept of a mouse is not productive. I’m supposed to move my hand to a different place, nudge something with accuracy, and click a button. I’m getting tired just thinking about it. I’d argue that unless you’re doing design or graphics, you can get by with just a keyboard. Most certainly as a software developer. Well, an occasional mouse contact might be required to browse a website and whatnot, but you’ll be better off without it for most things.

The annual Microsoft Build 2023 conference just occurred and it came with a truckload of announcements. This event is Microsoft’s developer-focused conference, and it’s usually about cloud services and developer platforms. But it’s not unusual for the conference to be used as a marketing opportunity, and this year wasn’t an exception. Microsoft marketed the hell out of Windows, Microsoft 365, and Bing among other products, and it did so with a singular focus on AI.

I don’t think I have to make the point of how important tools are. What would we do without IDEs like Visual Studio? Or without good email clients like Gmail and Outlook? For power users like software engineers, good tools can 10x your productivity. Everyone got their favorite tools, and I think I gathered a pretty good list. So here’s my list of tools that I use every day and highly recommend.

C# has been through a lot of change in the last decade. From open-sourcing the language to a new cross-platform framework to yearly releases instead of 3-year iterations. Meanwhile, new languages, new frameworks, and new paradigms have taken off in the software industry, including the rise in popularity of Node.js , TypeScript, Kotlin, Rust, Go, and Python. Through it all, C# and .NET stayed relevant and popular . In this blog post, we’ll glimpse the day-to-day activity and challenges the C# language design team faces.