The Answers to The Questions

Tony invited me to answer these multitudes of questions he posed in an earlier blog post and so I humbly offered some of my personal thoughts to these questions.

Name 3 improvements/revolutions in Java world that you are most impressed with

In the Java world, revolutions are overstated given the amount of backward compatibility they have with previous versions. The people behind the Java standards ensure that changes are always incremental and deprecated methods can survive at least 2 major revisions before being taken out. There's a reasonable amount of confidence that code compiled in Java 1.4 can still work with the latest JVM. So, if I would want to name 3 improvements that I feel impacted the Java world most, these are the following improvements that would be up there amongst the most impactful improvement

1. The popularization of the concept of Inversion of Control (IOC)

While technically not just a Java concept, the popularisation of the concept of IoC brought forward in the Spring Framework provided an alternative to the J2EE framework that has been standardised by Sun Microsystems. The concept of assembling components during runtime provided a means for applications to be written in a structured and cogent manner while reducing the amount of coupling between them. Many concepts from Spring has since made their way into the official JEE framework (together with major technologies like Hibernate)

2. The introduction of generics and annotations in Java 5

If there's any revolution to the language, this probably is it. While I would not necessary say I was impressed by it, I must say that it changed the way Java was written and it provided quite a fair bit of joy to people who are writing code using annotations while simultaneously inducing tears to those who had to debug code with it.

3. Enter the Lambda

Java 8 is going to introduce the concept of the lambda, a construct that is familiar to fans of dynamic languages while Java developers live in total oblivion to its existence. Millions of lines have been expended trying to write a Swing GUI Event Listener using anonymous inner classes like this :

        btnPrint.addActionListener(new java.awt.event.ActionListener(){
            public void actionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) {
                btnPrintActionPerformed(evt)
            }
        }

it's now gonna look like this :

        btnPrint.addActionListener(evt -> btnPrintActionPerformed(evt));

Happy Days!

Name 3 ideas or technology trends that you believe will be popular in future.

I'm not much of a star gazer but judging from the current technological trends and patterns, I believe the following will become key drivers (or continue to become key drivers) in the technology space.

1. Migration of information from traditional locally based systems to cloud-based platforms

This is probably a no-brainer but I believe that the cloud-based platforms are going to continue driving technological trends in the next few years. We have cloud-based services, storage, applications, build environments, test environments, development environments etc...

If you are not familiar with virtualization and its accompanying technologies, then I believe you are falling behind the curve. I can argue that knowledge of major cloud platforms like AWS is particularly crucial for IT professionals who are part of a highly agile and evolutionary organisation.

2. Predictive Data Analytics 

This is probably the biggest buzz word in the past 2 years. So what if machines are not probably going to surpass human intelligence anytime soon ala I, Robot? They are probably gonna be analysing and mining more data than ever in the history of mankind with improvements in technology and hardware. Any business that is able to predict the behaviour of human will have an edge over their competitors. Thus, any technology or techniques that aid in performing this kind of complex data analysis is going to be popular.

Think BigData storage technologies that can store zillion bytes of data. (pick your favourite Distributed File Systems and NoSql database servers)

Think technologies that can sift through those zillion bytes of data. (Hello Hadoop!)

Think advanced algorithms in A.I and Machine Learning

When combined together, these technologies are able to push food ads to you even before you realised you are hungry (ok.. that could be exaggerating a bit)

So in order to truly capture the zeitgeist of our age, as IT professionals, it is our duty to be conversant at least in some of these principles, if not an expert in them.

3. Restful Web Services and the Systems Integration of the World

Web systems will connect to each other in greater numbers and the language that they will speak to each other will probably be JSON. It is a language that is concise and lightweight compared to the verbose XML that was all the rage a decade ago. 

XML and the various incarnations it lives by has proven too complex and heavy for it to grow organically in an IT system. The mere mention of SOAP instills fear into the minds of many. Ditto for SOA systems .. the mind boggling array of implementation standards that have germinated from the XML seed has made it such a huge deterrent to implementation that it is unsurprising that the people who are really doing the development work and not theorizing about standards have gravitated towards JSON instead.

Together with the concept of Representational State Transfer architecture proposed by Roy Fielding in this paper , web services are talking to each other with greater ease due to the implementation of this concept built on top of a standard that is already well understood (HTTP)

The growing popularity of RESTFul APIs will make the web the gigantic interconnected system that it was originally planned to be.

Name 3 major issues that you would want to elaborate about IT in Singapore and/or Asia.

1. Career progression in a software career is how fast you can get out of it.

In Singapore, a successful software engineer/developer/<put your favourite title> is someone who managed to work his way "up" the career ladder so he doesn't touch any development but instead focus on "managing" people or analysing business needs. It's interesting how much management needs to be done for people who are sufficiently intelligent enough to be developing software. Truth be told, it's highly unlikely that Singapore's going to have a Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page/Sergey Brin given the general disdain for even doing the dreary work known as coding. In order for software engineers to excel in Singapore/Asia, the same amount of recognition given to good engineers in the States should be accorded to software engineers here. Truth be told, there is still a demand for routine IT work that makes the systems in corporations all over the hum smoothly. However, there should be distinction between software engineers who have the know-how, the agility and the rapid learning curve to embrace change and build strategic software Vs the software maintainers in charge of ensuring corporate systems run smoothly. Think about software that will enable businesses to leapfrog ahead of their competitors vs your typical payroll/accounting/HR software. In fact, I would argue that a better use of resources would be to outsource all these software to 3rd party vendors who will make these their strategic software.

2. There is insufficiently exposure/vibrancy to emerging technologies due to the tepidness of the scene here.

In Singapore, the technology / startup scene is relatively cooler than many parts of the world right now. Despite the flourishing startup scene all over the world spearheaded by Internet-based enterprises, Singapore has been relatively cool in spawning up companies that is hitching on this Internet wave. There's a general perception that good software engineers are hard to find over here. There is probably some truth in it given that most people in the IT software industry generally give up doing practical development work a few years into their work so that they take on a "leadership/management/consulting/business analyst" role. The myth and perception is that people who remain in development are generally not moving in their career. With this kind of perception, it's nearly impossible to get good people with sufficient experience and well-honed skills to develop systems. This would eventually lead to a brain drain in development on the higher echelons of development/technical experience as good software engineers get siphoned into alternate roles that pay better.

If more than anything, it is this mindset that will eventually set us back against other countries who have people with decades of experience in development and technical work.

3. Innovation is stifled

In a culture where deviation from the norm is scoffed at and where attempts to trail blaze are put down as fast as you can say SOP, it's hard for any disciplines that require a combination of technical prowess and creativity to thrive. I don't think there's any other technical disciplines that could come as close as writing code to being an art form. Truly, code can be written beautifully. Any developer worth their salt can tell you the difference between well-written and ugly code.

The education process in Singapore/Asia also plays a part in inculcating such a mindset. Rote learning and memorization to game the education system has become an economically valuable skill as compared to investigative and exploratory learning. We are trained to get straight As in the shortest amount of time. Spending more time to understand what we've learnt has been secondary to cut-and-pasting code so that we get our goals. No innovation can be made by merely aping the work of others.

If software professionals are to really make meaningful progress in Singapore/Asia, we have to address these issues first.

If you need to share 3 lessons to your junior developers, what would you say?

1. Keep learning and exploring

It may sound cliched but in this industry, you simply cannot stop learning more. Read up on industry norms and practices. There are so many valuable online reading material that it will be inexcusable not to find new things to learn.

Read sites like InfoQ , Hacker News, Reddit, ArsTechnica etc.. for trends in technology and development.

There are also tons of resources that focus on teaching programming / development skills.

2. Wear a T-shirt persona to your self-development

A developer with a T-shirt character is an expert in a specific field e.g. Java/C#/Javascript etc development (depth of skill) while maintaining general expertise in a large number of fields .. (breadth of skills)

So a valuable member of a team is someone who can perform basic skills like setup computer OS/es , design simple pages using CSS/HTML while having expert level skills in Java development.

3. Attitude is paramount

I would argue that a developer with the right attitude would surpass a more intelligent developer in terms of contributions to a team. However, attitude is an abstract idea that makes it hard to distill into character qualities that are obtrusive.

If I could some sieve it into something more concrete, I would consider the right attitude to consist of the following:

1. Perseverance in the face of obstacles or discomfort to achieve a greater goal. Someone who gives up easily on the first encounter with resistance would not make a good developer.
2. Someone who considers his works with pride and would not settle for mediocrity.
3. Someone who would take up challenges and not avoid them.
4. Someone who is open to better ideas and not stick to dogma or their comfort zone.
5. Someone who works to accomplish goals and not clock hours.

Name 3 common mistakes that developers tend to make.

1. Copy pasting code "that worked before"

This is subjective as there are many proponents of code-reuse but I would argue that this is not an example of code reuse. Rather, an example of code reuse would be refactoring code so that a method can be shared classes. Many times during the course of my career, I've seen people who copy and paste code from the Internet and pray that the same code work without truly understanding what it is trying to do. Most of the time, such an approach may work but when it doesn't, it's gonna be very trying to debug.

2. Inadequate understanding of multi-threaded concepts e.g. Thread Safety

I'm personally guilty of making this mistake as concurrency and thread safety is a tough concept to grasp and working on the level of having to ensure that your code is safe from deadlocks is not something that I do often. However, it's important even in day-to-day web development to understand how different threads working concurrently could severely impact how your code run if there are shared objects between these threads. So it is important not to make the same mistake I committed by having a thorough understanding of concurrency concepts if you are working in Java. For proponents of single threaded processing paradigms like Javascript or Node.js , I guess this isn't much of an issue.

3. Applying the wrong database solution to a problem.

Relational Databases have been around for years. People are definitely more comfortable writing SQL queries than tinkering with non-relational databases. However, as I've mentioned in an earlier response to technological trends, the era of BigData is upon us. Unfortunately, I've yet to be convinced how relational databases can function reliably and speedily with large database sizes. My team is now currently working with datasets that are not even in the terabyte range and we are experiencing timeout issues with MySQL when we perform queries (and that is with some degree of optimisation work we have done). Thus, I'm convinced that the out of the box MySQL definitely would not work and even with a powerful database server that has been tuned to death, I'm not sure if fitting a terabyte of data would even work practically even if the filesystem/table primary key size supports tables of that size. Thus, it's important to size up the use case for each problem that we have and select the most suitable database to address the problem. Martin Fowler's book seemed to have a reference to such a philosophy with the concept of Polyglot Persistence. I have not read this book yet but I'm definitely gonna be picking it up.

If you need to define you programming/design style in 3 points, what would you say?

I would say my development style would to be as concise as possible while maintaining a certain degree of flexibility. This might sound like a oxymoron given that flexibility is usually provided by increasing the amount of code but I believe that with simple rules of thumb e.g. code to interfaces (instead of concrete classes) and then relying on IoC or Dependency Injection for runtime assembly, you can create flexible code without the excess baggage.

I spend equal amounts of time developing in both dynamic languages (Python, Ruby, Javascript) as well as Java. I can't say I am partial to either as they all try to achieve the same goal, which is to provide a way to express code that form reliable, useful applications. Java provides a stable reliable way to navigate code within the IDE and with sufficient experience, one can be very productive when working with Java. However, the amount of concepts involved in mastering Java could be mind-boggling for a newbie.

On the other hand, dynamic languages like Python and Ruby can easily be picked up and they have a very natural language style of coding which expresses succintly what Java might take 3 times more code to express.

I'm also a believer in using the right language for the right problems. For example, right now I'm also looking at using a little R in my quest to master machine learning concepts. For interaction with hardware or low level devices, I think it's hard to avoid using C. I'm not as experienced in these fields but if I need to solve a problem in these domains, I will not hesitate to polish up my rusty C programming skills.