Blaine Osepchuk

Learn what makes software maintenance so challenging and what you can do to be more successful at it.

This post explains what safety-critical software is, how it's supposed to be constructed, how it's actually constructed, and where the field is heading.

High Integrity Sumobot is an advanced-level project programmed in Ada/SPARK and Arduino (C++).

I'm building a sumobot for the 2019 Make with Ada contest.

Most teams could deliver their software projects sooner if they focused more effort on defect prevention, early defect removal, and other quality issues.

This no B.S. guide will tell you what you need to know to survive and thrive as a software developer at my workplace (or just about any workplace).

The Coaching Habit will teach you to manage other programmers without losing your mind. In this post I offer you a summary of this very useful book.

My must read programming books are universally applicable (you'll benefit from reading them regardless of the kind of programming you do).

I use a SAD light as soon as I wake up to go from groggy and useless to fully alert in a couple of minutes. It's one hell of a productivity hack.

PSP is too hard to follow for most of software developers. But I think you can adapt the PSP principles and get 80% of the benefits with 20% of the work.

Software architecture is an important topic. Let me explain why you might want to skip reading Clean Architecture and what you should read instead.

There are only two economical ways to achieve extremely low defect rates in your code. You can learn the Personal Software Process (PSP) or use safer languages and tools. I plan to explore both options to improve my performance as a software developer.

The more I learn about Tesla's self driving car development, the more concerned I become about the ethics of working as a software developer on the Tesla autopilot software. Continue reading to learn all the reasons why.

How simple is too simple to test? If you are following unit testing best practices, you should test any behavior you care about, no matter how simple. By combining unit tests with other quality assurance activities, you maximize your chances of catching silly mistakes before they get into production.

Are you confused by the rewrite vs refactor debate? In this post, I'm going simplify things for you and help you decide if you should rewrite, refactor, or do something else to improve the health of your software system.

The Theory of Constraints can help you solve one of the hardest problems in software engineering (figuring out what to work on next). Several experts have written novels about people learning and applying the Theory of Constraints to make it easier for you pick up the basics. In this post I'll tell you about 4 of them.

You don't need to learn at least one new language every year to be a "good" programmer. The best programmers see the bigger picture and prioritize what they learn so that they can deliver the best possible results.

I'd like to increase my chances of making the "must read" list in the weekly emails. How are the "m...

In this post, I'm going to show you how I discovered undervalued stories in my backlog that were hiding in plain sight for years. Then I'll show you how to correct this common mistake and prioritize your backlog more accurately so you can be sure you are working on the most important thing

Business continuity planning is important for every key employee in your company, including software developers. In this post in going to show you the steps I took to ensure my company wouldn't be crippled if I died suddenly.

As software developers, we are doing a poor job of protecting the data we collect from our users because software security is hopelessly broken.

Hi everybody, I'm trying to maximise the value of my posts to the dev.to community but I don't know...

I read some great books in 2017. In the nonfiction realm, some of them are very much on point for software developers. Others are just good books that let you know what's going on in the world. In fiction, I'm drawn to technology-driven Sci-Fi.

Learning to order your backlog by quantitative cost of delay divided by duration (CD3) will help you take your effectiveness to the next level.

Ordering your backlog for maximum economic benefit is a hard problem. In this post, I'm going to show you how to prioritize your product backlog by CD3.

Teams engage in simultaneous feature development to keep everyone on the team busy. But cost of delay tells us that's often the wrong thing to optimize.

My IDE has dramatically increased the quality of the code I write and the speed with which I write it.

The software we create is powerful, which means it can also be dangerous. Is it time to license software developers like we license people to drive a car?

We are drowning in worthless software. Learn the risks of worthless software and how to keep worthless software out of your software development process.

Learn how to make time to repay your technical debt while you continue to deliver features and bug fixes. Start by improving your efficiency.