Uttam Kini's Blog

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  • The scarcity mindset

    I have noticed a peculiar practice among the older generation of my family. They hate “wasting food”. They will overeat even if it isn’t in their best interests. Most have metabolic disorders and eating more is bad for them. This doesn’t apply just to food. They also hate giving stuff away even if they will Read more

  • On busywork

    The 70 hour work week meme is quite popular on social media these days. It took me 15 years of experience to debunk the myth that I have to work 40 hours a week to be actually “productive”.In the early part of my career, it was simpler. As a software engineer someone told what to Read more

  • Developer productivity

    Thanks to the popularity of generative AI, there has been an explosion of AI based coding assistants.Then there is the recent McKinsey report on measuring developer productivity. Management has again fallen back into the trap of measuring dev outputs (rather than outcomes). They feel that somehow, if they can improve dev productivity numbers using coding Read more

  • Now I am reading books more than ever

    It’s been three months now and I have read more books than what I did in the last one year before that . There are a couple of reasons why 1. I bought a kindle paperwhite three months ago 2. I challenged my philosophy of reading one book at a time I have been reading Read more

  • Pair Programming on a Mac

    I have been pair programming for more than four years. One of the most basic things that you need to do is to find a way to share your screen, keyboard and mouse. The easiest to setup is with two people working on a laptop. It is also the most uncomfortable because you end up Read more

  • Build Automation on Windows

    I have heard  people complain that it is hard to automate almost anything on Windows/.Net. It is one of the few things that even I agreed with, until I tried to do it a couple of days ago. To do it you may have to  not do everything that Microsoft tells you to and not Read more

  • Sharing code and why git submodules is a bad idea.

    Recently at a client, we had to build restful services that talk to each other. We had a choreographed set of services, which meant that any service could talk to another service. The problem we had was, we were constantly refactoring the messages that were used by the services to talk to one another. We Read more

  • The curious case of the permanent contractor

    When I first came to the UK, I found the concept of the IT contractor was very different to the Indian IT contractor. In India, an IT contractor or ‘contract employee’ is like a daily wage labourer. Let me explain why. The wages are much lower compared to a permanent employee. You work for a Read more

  • Stuff that Microsoft must stop doing

    I recently moved off .net after 3 years. Now I am working in the wonderful world of linux (more on it in another post). Looking back and reflecting on .Net and windows, I feel windows is a pretty decent desktop OS (nobody else can beat it’s driver support). I still use it for my personal Read more

  • Water falls bottom up

    I have been doing test driven development on a standard 3-tier web application for around 2 years now. Initially I felt that doing bottom up development was the best thing to do. It was easy for me to think of small domain objects on the service side that seemed to have small pieces of the Read more