Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

1. Do NOT chase the latest versions of libraries/software/tools. Wait for some time for them to be tested thoroughly before adopting them.

2. Follow a good Semantic Versioning if you release your own library/software.

3. Keep a good habit to use parentheses whenever the precedences of operators are not clear to you. For example, bitwise operators and the ternary operator/expression have relative low priority (lower precedence than arithmatical operators) in most programming languages. If you omit parentheses in the expression (1L << 54) - 1 (where << is the bitwise right shift operator), the expression is equivalent to 1L << 53 which might not be what you want. This kind of mistake is a common and tricky one. If you use the Kotlin programming language, it is suggested that you use the bitwise methods instead of the bitwise operators.

4. Always remember to check whether you have correct set/reset state of variables when you use loops especiall while loops. Forgetting to set/reset state of varialbes/objects in while loops is a common mistake and can be tricky to debug sometimes (e.g., if randomization is used in a loop). It is suggested that you avoid using plain for/while loops if possible and use high-level alternatives such as forEach, map, filter, etc.

5. Any initialization that might involve network, etc. which might either fail or take a long time should be delayed as much as possible. For example, if you define command-line options using the library argparse and a default value might take a long time to run, it is better to set the defautl value to None and then calculalte the default value when the corresponding command is called.

Performance and Memory Profiling

1. Always profile your application if you are not certain about the real performance of different algorithms/implementations.

2. Warm up is important when profiling speed of applications. Profession tools/frameworks often handle this automatically. It is suggested that you leverage profession profiling/benchmark tools instead of writing your code to profile/benchmark your application.

Engineering

1. Batch/robot accounts are much more convenient to use than personal accounts in an enterprise environment as personal accounts are often required to do 2FA.

2. Availability and stability are way more important than productivity and cool technology in critical business applications. Avoid purchasing cutting-edge technologies in those situations but rather wait for new technologies to be well tested before adopting them.

References

General Tips for Engineering

General Tips on Debugging