Abhy's Canvas

My BLOGS

"I am still learning" - Michelangelo

“The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.” — B.B. King.

I have realized that my learnings solidify when I share my learning with others. I will be posting my learnings here in an atempt to first teach myself and in so doing be helpful to others. I will also use this space sometimes to post about my experiences also.

If you spot an error, or have any comments, suggestions or questions about what I've written, contact me on email vabhynadar@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you.

Why software engineers avoid writing Unit Tests

In the ideal world of software development, every piece of code would be accompanied by a robust set of unit tests. However, in reality, many software engineers skip writing unit tests, instead relying on minimal manual verification and leaving extensive testing to a dedicated QA team.

Sun Mar 09 2025

What does the Sprint duration say about the team

In my 20+ years of experience in software industry, I have come across various teams with varied durations of sprint cycle, ranging from one week to as long as six weeks. From what I’ve observed and understood, the longer the sprint duration, the less agile the processes and teams become, often resembling traditional waterfall methodologies more than Agile.

Sat Feb 08 2025

Finding the right balance in software development practices

In my software development experience, I have encountered two polar extremes of dysfunction that plague organizations. On one end, businesses adopt an over-engineered, complicated approach to Agile frameworks. On the other, businesses discard structure entirely, dismissing - processes, tracking, documentation, and even product roles.

Fri Jan 31 2025

What does frequency of deployment say about the team

In the fast-evolving landscape of software development, the frequency of deployment has emerged as a key metric to gauge a team's maturity. Teams that deploy software more frequently often exhibit characteristics of a well-oiled, efficient, and adaptable machine.

Sat Jan 11 2025

What to do when you inherit codebase

In my 20+ years in IT industry, what has been constant is seeing software engineers and teams struggle with legacy or inherited codebase. I completely understand it is not easy when you have to handle legacy or inherited codebase.

Sun Jan 05 2025

An architect should know The C4 Model

The C4 Model is a lean graphical notation technique for visualising software architecture. It helps software development teams to describe and communicate software architecture. The C4 refers to Context, Container, Component and Code diagram.

Sat Jan 13 2024

Singleton design pattern

I have been in software industry now for more than 20+ years. During this 20+ years I have taken countless interviews and seen that software developers have such limited knowledge of design patterns. The moment you ask them about any design pattern they have used and can explain, they will immediately say Singleton pattern. Now most of these software developers (using it in generic terms to include SSE, TL, STL, Architect and Sr. Architects) do not know how to code a simple Singleton implementation. This is across the tech stack - Java, and C# both. You realise almost immediately that they have never thought about their implementations seriously, nor have they done any good reading and worst this just shows their immaturity at software development.

Sat Dec 30 2023

You should have a branching strategy

Software teams have to collaborate their work among the team members. This collaboration is managed effectively by setting up a clear strategy around how the source code will be made available to team members, how they will be able to manage their individual changes and track them, how they will make their individual code changes available to the entire team and then from where to pick up code for shipping to various environment.

Sat Aug 21 2021

Security in AWS S3

AWS S3 offers many features to secure stored data. As team developing AWS solutions and making use of S3 services, we have to understand and utilize the security controls offered by S3 to secure files related to product.

Sat Jul 10 2021

Introduction to Plotly

Plotly has become immensely popular in the Charting world. It boasts of 50M+ users, 59K GitHub Stars for all Plotly projects put together, 10M+ monthly downloads and $30M in funding.

Sat Jun 12 2021

You should have a logging strategy

Every software product you create should think through its logging strategy. Logging Strategy informs or guides the development team on what tools to use for logging, what to log, how much to log, where to log, how to collect these logs, how to view these logs, and how long to keep these logs.

Sat May 22 2021

Security in AWS IAM

One of the first things you should do when building for AWS is start thinking about Security. You have to be on your toes right from the beginning. In the arena of Cloud, security cannot be an after thought. Consequences of failing to consider security from ground up is huge.

Sun Mar 14 2021

AWS - Elastic Load balancing

In AWS, Elastic Load Balancing is used to automatically distribute incoming traffic across multiple targets like AWS EC2 instances, containers, or Lambda functions.

Sun Feb 21 2021

Elements of VPC in AWS

In the previous post we looked at VPC. In this post we will take a closer look at the various elements of VPC.

Sat Jan 30 2021

As you enter into the world of AWS one of the first things that get created for you as part of your account is the VPC. So what exactly is this VPC? Lets find out.

Sun Jan 24 2021