Rob Pacheco

Software engineers, you have a super power! You can build! As we enter this new year, there will be more companies, more founders who will need cofounders and early engineers to build. Sure, founders could outsource or they could try to use some AI. There is certainly a lot AI…

Question for software developers: Did you ever hear the story about the farm hand that can sleep through a storm? Let's say it's 2am, you get an automated call telling you that your service is down. You roll out of bed, look through some docs, and realize you have no idea what's…

To anyone familiar with Scrum or Agile development meetings - does it seem a bit strange that the "Daily Standup" meetings are always in the morning? I get the intention behind it - you want a quick daily sync before the day begins to make sure everyone is on the same page...…

Top 3 Things Software Engineers should learn about application security - Common application vulnerabilities (for whichever type of app you are building) - How the frameworks you use can help mitigate these vulnerabilities - How 3rd party dependencies can completely destroy your…

It's not uncommon for companies to hire infosec teams that handle vulnerability management, supply chain security, and overall security scanning. This is helpful for general infrastructure, cloud, and operating systems... However, when it comes to application-level…

We need to rethink Story Pointing in Agile methodologies: - Story points are intended to be the relative complexity for a task, but they almost always end up being number of estimated days - Requires complete, shared knowledge of the codebase to be effective - Requires most…

Agree/Disagree: Errors in Go(lang) are a good form of error handling? The biggest problem with developers using Go errors, is the use them in a way that becomes overly verbose. This makes error handling seem like a lot of work in Go. Most modern languages support Exceptions as…

Unpopular Opinion: Software needs to do less It's been a trend for decades that software just keeps doing more and more. It's seen as a way to make software more valuable. The more it can do, the better right? That's been proven wrong most of the time. We need to go back to a…

Software engineers probably spend more time than most in front of a keyboard. I certainly fall into that category. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been making sure I block off time for exercise and non-tech reading. It’s been a huge productivity booster. I’m spending less…

Quote of a quote from the book “ThePractice of Programming” “In the end, only familiarity with the tools and techniques of the field will provide the right solution for a particular problem, and only a certain amount of experience will provide consistently professional results.”…

As an engineering leader, it's common to use past experience to lead your team down a specific path. Before doing so, make sure you're aware of the specific problem context as well as the team's background and experience. It won't do any good if your recommendations aren't the…

Remember back in the day, when there was the promise of "reusable object oriented code"? When you could build a library of components that would work great and you could just use them everywhere and make countless products out of them? Ok, so that didn't really work out.. But a…

If you're in the kind of job where you have lots of meetings, it's far more productive to keep the meetings as short as possible.... Not only could you choose to get more work done in that free time - but if you shrink the meeting time from 60 to 30 minutes - you can have twice…

It seems like the cybersecurity industry relies on (or at least promotes) a lot of certifications. To be fair, there are certifications for a lot of areas in technical fields - Java, DotNet, AWS, GCP, etc.. But I think most people put a lot less of an emphasis on those than on…

So, AI is going to be super smart soon. Smart enough so that it will replace all software engineers. When it does that, will it become that smart by learning everything from existing software engineers? I ask because most software engineers are really bad at writing secure…

When trying to figure out the best way to solve a coding problem, it’s often useful to approach it with different types of abstractions. This can be helpful to shift your thinking across multiple perspectives and could lead to a much cleaner implementation.

I remember back before unit testing was popular. Back in the dark days of full, manual QA. Unit testing became a normal thing to do. It was great, and certainly improved quality. And then came the idea of code coverage. And that brought with it mocks. And that’s when unit…

I might be bit early on this, but is anyone else noticing a slow trend away from the just hosting everything in one of the big cloud providers? Or keeping all of your work, data and communications in a single, centralized place that you have no control over? I'm seeing an…

It seems like there are SO many tweets and articles and tutorials about "software architecture" that talk specifically about "distributed architecture" and "microservice architecture" and many other similar topics. Now, those are all important - but the focus of all of those are…