Niko Heikkilä

A longstanding grievance with several social media platforms has been how they promote the use of AI in content creation, but for all the wrong use cases. For…

I was watching Scott Tolinski’s insightful video on Syntax about the negative mental health effects developers experience while coding with AI. Measuring it…

I’m writing this post with Neovim editor. You probably haven’t heard of it. Or if you’ve ever come close to talking with a software developer, you’ve probably…

Ha, got you there, did I? For once, the title of my blog post intentionally deceives you. Well, as a matter of fact I do have a vibe-coding workflow. It goes…

Originally published on Polar Squad blog. In the previous chapter, we gained confidence through comprehensive testing, including unit tests, property-based…

Originally published on Polar Squad blog. In the previous post, we improved the design of our GitHub Action to make it testable. But having testable code is…

Originally published on Polar Squad blog. Like many other types of scripts, GitHub Actions suffer from a common problem: it’s tempting to take a legacy Bash or…

Originally published on Polar Squad blog. Have you ever rushed to push a GitHub Action, only to watch it fail in the pipeline? Or inherited an action so tightly…

I’m going to show you two code snippets that solve the same problem of comparing two inputs. One takes ten lines. The other takes seventy. Which one would you…

Thomas Ptacek published this article in the Fly.io company blog. You might ask why such a one-sided and belittling rant with plenty of toxic vitriol could be…

Originally published on Polar Squad blog Generative AI tools have changed how we developers approach our daily work. Today, headlines tout the arrival of AI…

Some years ago, I noticed I had grown increasingly frustrated with the modern trends in the software engineering field. People I had worked and conversed with…

Benefits of Small Batches and Vertical Slicing When capturing and writing down the work we need to do, we often add it to our designated issue-tracking system…

Whenever there is a new film from the master of anarchistic cinema, Yorgos Lanthimos, I must remind myself to bring something to support my jaws into the…

One technique of ensuring my work will be remembered is giving back professional pointers on how the client can improve the quality of their product and process…

The goal of every software team is to deliver the solution into their users’ hands sooner than later. In this post, I will explain how to set up a CI/CD…

In the previous chapters, you saw how the heart of our architecture — services, gateways, and domain models — were covered with behavioural IO-free tests…

In the previous chapters, I have demonstrated the power of designing and testing a backend within the frontend, but you can only walk so far. I haven’t touched…

Whether you follow the domain-driven design or not, clean domain modelling is one of the most crucial problems we software engineers must tackle. Why is that…

In the previous post, I designed our service and use case handlers. However, it had one glaring detail I left unexplained: the gateway. What exactly is a…

The essence of software lies in the problems it helps us to solve. Software that doesn’t offer a solution to the problem is only code for the joy of coding…

Long gone in the past are websites that purely displayed static, seldom changing content to visitors. Today, almost all user interfaces are web applications…

In software development, there’s a lot of talk about small vs big batches. However, that talk mostly comes from the Lean methodologies perspective, which, while…

The single most important topic in functional programming is to understand what a function is. Inherently, a function is a way to map the input value of some…

I often ponder my work and where I want to head with it. Thus, it’s only logical to understand what I need to learn to get there. Moreover, the more I think of…

I’m going to admit something: I had trouble understanding test-driven development (TDD) and it took me a long time to get over it. TDD felt mysterious…

I’ve recently participated in discussions related to developer productivity. I think productivity is harmful because it can fool us into thinking high-frequency…

Recently, I had a discussion with my team regarding an always timely question: at what level should I write my automated tests: unit, integration, or end-to-end…

This post was originally published in Futurice blog. Disclaimer: similar to other ways of working, both pair and mob programming are known to elicit heated…

Few rules in designing clean code have been as crucial for me as Kent Beck’s four rules of simple design. To jog your memory, they are as follows: Well-designed…