DEV Community: Lukas Lotz

CUPID - Why every single element of SOLID is wrong

Lukas Lotz — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 07:37:33 +0000

SOLID is THE standard that comes to my mind when it comes to Guidelines of Software Design and Architecture. In March 2021, Dan North, a pioneered Software Consultant, wrote a blogpost about SOLID and it's downsides while critically analyzing it.

I found this topic when listening to an episode of the .NET Rocks podcast. Dan is good in describing things and he has an absolute fantastic humor.

He created a 5 minute presentation for an alternative to SOLID and the result was this slideshow about CUPID.

As SOLID was quite hard to apply and gave you specific techniques on how to do certain things, his new approach CUPID, he suggested as an alternative, aims to be 'properties' instead of 'principles' for the code you're writing. It seems much more easy to understand and doesn't give you strict techniques. In his words he gives a leightweight guide on how code should be to be 'joyful'.

In the mentioned podcast episode he gave the example that fresh software engineers coming from university applying SOLID to legacy production code will sometimes end in a mess because they're too enthusiastic about applying the technical rules, SOLID contains.

I know this problem very well because when I learned about SOLID, I sometimes found code that was not designed to follow at least one of the principles but it was well working code that had a structure that someone has thought about catchy.

If I would have applied the properties of CUPID, I would have seen the code with other eyes, I guess.

I see why Dan North rethought the SOLID principles. Not everything about SOLID is bad, that's why it proofed to be an unstated standard.

I, for myself, will try to apply CUPID to code I change and write because in my eyes it has the potential to be a new standard. Additionaly it is a lot easier to explain to coworkers, trainees and students.

I think it can bring even more joy to coding and thats what we all need so badly.

Top apps to be productive

Lukas Lotz — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 06:22:42 +0000

If you're reading this, you propably expect to get one or more tips for tools you didn't already know that make you more productive magically. In case you are a disciplined worker, you will be disappointed to read this article as the title was a little clickbaity.

But in case you are in a phase like me some weeks ago, you are procrastinating and wasting your time reading articles and watching videos on how to be productive. I hope this method and the comprehensive tooling will help you.

Start for 5 Minutes

If you have to work on stuff you don't want to work on, start a stop watch (no timer with notification), put it outside your field of view and start the task. If you take a look at the watch again and >= 5 mins passed, you can desicde if you stop or finish that task.

If you stop: You got more done than you would have done without this method.
If you continue or ignore the stop watch: Congratulations, you were outgrowing yourself.

How to get productive

Get your ass up
Replace "I should" with "I will"
Switch off distractions
Kick off that sound track that makes you focus
Start working

You want a new Todo-App? --> Open your text editor.
You want to note sth? --> Text editor.

It's amazing how you're able to organize stuff inside a simple text editor by just starting.

Have a productive day.

What we learned during the lockdown

Lukas Lotz — Mon, 18 May 2020 05:48:52 +0000

I thought about the things I learned while working from home during the lockdown and wrote them down in a small list.

100% remote is possible with ease in my job (even for me)
From home I tend to work more than less
It doesn't take shoes or pants to be focused on work while working from home
After a month at home, weekend finally feels like weekend again
I do not need a seperate workspace at home to focus
I have a lot more time at home
It's possible for my gf and me to be together 24/7 for more than a month without going insane (guess she's a keeper)
I'm propably wasting a lot of time when driving to work
Keeping muscles in shape with rubber bands excercises is possible
I'm eating a ton of shit. I should improve my eating habits.
I need my podcasts (especially the chitchat ones)
I can easily keep myself up to date with twitch, tech podcasts and youtube
I have an online community that is able to replace my entire social life (for a medium-term period at least)

If you have made this kind of experience, feel free to write them down in the comments, I'm curious about it.

Enjoy uncomfortability

Lukas Lotz — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 05:47:17 +0000

NO PAIN - NO GAIN

This is not only valid for training in the gym. From time to time it's important to leave your comfort zone to get into latest technology, especially when you're employed at IT. Sometimes, when a new technology is released and I heard about it I thought "Naah, I will come along without that framework." Just because I didn't understand it on the spot and was afraid of learning that new thing.

Oh, I can write plain PHP. That worked out for the past 10 years, no need for Laravel.

Nooo, vanilla JS does it, I don't need React at all.

.NET Core is just a trend, let's stay at .NET Framework for new projects.

I bet you said that once in the past. For sure, not every trendy framework or database or server software has to be learned, for some topics it is enough to scratch the surface. But what happens when you act like that all the time?

Basically, there are two things that will happen:

You forget how to learn new things and the boundary that has to be crossed becomes higher and higher.
You'll be at the bottom of every line.

I bet you can find yourself in that story, too:

Once I got asked to conduct a workshop for my colleagues about git. Before I even thought about it I heard myself responding: "Yes, of course."
What have I done? I'm far away from cutting the edge at git, I used some basic stuff but thats all. I, once, had conducted a workshop for a small group of people but I even forgot how to do that or how that stuff works.
Leaving all that discrepancy in my mind behind, I just started creating a markdown file which was supposed to lead the way through my workshop. Assuming to be a member of the workshop I was just creating, I started researching and writing down stuff that would be helpful. I put that in a order the knowledge I would teach would stack up with the time of participating in the workshop. The workshop took place and it was fantastic to deliver what I was preparing for. I got positive feedback and it felt awesome!

Not that I just boosted my colleagues knowledge. While researching I started understanding things better for myself.

Sometimes a rash answer can be the solution to learn something new or improving on something. Having that experience reflected, I began moving out of my comfort zone more often.

Machine info at a glance with rainmeter

Lukas Lotz — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 07:14:42 +0000

What is Rainmeter?

Rainmeter is an application for windows that allows you to add a layer to your desktop with any information you want. You can add application launchers and install predefined userskins. There's a decent community which provides new skins all the time.

What does it look like?

The way you want. I designed it to show information about my workstation.

Especially when I'm running a local test environment or compiling things I like to have all the information about my work machine at a glance without popping around the taskmanager and stuff. Rainmeter is highly customizable and quite well performing (as you can see in the screenshot)

To get more information and skins, take a look at

My Personal Kanban - Keep track of your tasks

Lukas Lotz — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 08:49:01 +0000

The Struggle

In some meetings I found myself not having done all the tasks I was told to finish. Not because I'm lazy or I didn't found time but mainly because I just forgot about it.

My Attempts

No notes

That's where I came from. Forget it. With a decent amount of context switching during the day, you'll soon lose track of the most of your tasks and so did I.

Notebook

I started writing down my personal tasks to paper but soon I got in trouble. I forgot looking in the notebook, the pages got messed up with tasks and notes, there was not enough space to add additional notes. It was a mess.

Markdown File

I don't know why, but after the notebook attempt I started arranging my daily work in a markdown file. This was not as messy as the notebook but soon I found myself cutting and pasting lines around, improvising ways to mark tasks for their different states. It worked but I put a lot of effort in arranging tasks.. it could have been better.

Solution

Requirements

My filthy attempts in managing my tasks didn't work out but I learned what I NOT need. So based on this I put together requirements for a new tool to find or else write by myself.

Offline, for company security reasons
Reliable (being able to create backups)
Simple and fast Task management
Everything at a glance
Dark theme would be great

With that in mind and the knowledge about the SCRUM-Board, also knowing about kanban, I was looking for a simple kanban solution. I found many online application like Trello and stuff but FINALLY found the solution to all of my task managing problems.

My Personal Kanban

My Personal Kanban on Github

With that awesome piece of angular based software, you can manage your tasks in cards, quickly create new ones, grab them to switch their state and sort them by color. And all that locally! If you wish, you can create an online backup to the cloud. Exactly what I needed.

Now, that I'm managing my personal work tasks in this software for about a month now, I realize that I'm getting more reliable and have all my stuff done (except there's a lack of time, of course).

If you consider using this be always sure to make a backup as the data is stored in your browsers cache. Therefore you can hit the export button and store a json file.

Additionaly it's open source!

That's what I call a solution.