blog – Beginning Of Expression

The Paradox of Replaceability: How Being Replaceable Makes You Indispensable

April 3, 2025 Nikhil Wanpal Comments 0 Comment

In the fast-paced world of IT, job security often feels like a precarious tightrope walk. We strive to be valuable, essential, and irreplaceable. But what if the key to career success lies in embracing the opposite? What if being replaceable is the ultimate power move? Yes, you read that right. Aim to be the most replaceable member of your team. This might sound counterintuitive, even alarming. But let’s delve into why this approach can catapult your career and make you…

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The Legend of the Untested Code

January 7, 2025 Nikhil Wanpal Comments 0 Comment

Have you heard the tale of the Untested Code? A mythical beast that haunts the dreams of developers, causing chaos in its wake. Legend speaks of a time when a desperate coder, pressed by looming deadlines, dared to push code to production without the sacred rites of writing tests. The code, against all odds, worked. A miracle! Or was it? As days turned to weeks, the true nature of this unholy creation revealed itself. What was once a simple function…

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Unpacking Google’s 25% AI-Generated Code: What This Really Means for Development

November 3, 2024 Nikhil Wanpal Comments 0 Comment

Before we start urging our developer “hens” to lay more golden eggs with AI, let’s examine a statement from Google’s recent Q3 earnings call: 25% of new code at Google is now written by AI. (ref: https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/google-ceo-says-more-than-a-quarter-of-the-companys-new-code-is-created-by-ai/articleshow/114752080.cms) This news is everywhere, and understandably so. The way it’s worded seems designed to set a new baseline in AI assisted development, especially as Google emphasizes its leadership in AI. It’s worth examining what this truly implies beyond the headlines. After all, earnings…

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Tip #3: Always ensure you have high comment to code ratio, the more comments the better!

September 30, 2024 Nikhil Wanpal Comments 0 Comment

In the best cases, the comments can constitute 50% or more of your code, and that would be a good thing. The code is read more often than it is written, so explain every line of code with a comment so the next developer can understand it well. We do not write code in English (yet!) but in a language specifically designed for computers. Computers are better suited to understand it than humans. Code can be cryptic, unintuitive, and difficult…

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Tip #2: To make your tests more specific and focus only on the class you are testing, mock everything else.

March 19, 2024 Nikhil Wanpal Comments 0 Comment

It is always observed that changes in one class cause other class’s tests to fail. This happens often because many other classes change when we change one class, leading to many other tests changing / breaking. It is always best to mock all other classes. That way, other classes are not actually used in the test, and you can ensure that your tests do not break! This also ensures that the only coverage we get is from the test written…

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Tip 1: Always commit as many unrelated features and bug fixes as possible into a single commit.

March 15, 2024 Nikhil Wanpal Comments 0 Comment

First, this will make your commit message a cryptic mishmash, which no sane person will understand! Second, when someone needs to cherry-pick something from one branch onto another, they’ll be unable to do so cleanly. If you are linking your commits with JIRA, this is even more awesome because now the unrelated JIRA stories are also linked together by this commit! And if your team uses JIRA or commit messages to write release notes, oh well, they are in for…

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Kill The Hi

August 21, 2023 Nikhil Wanpal Comments 1 comment

Kill The Hi Yeah, you read it right; I mean the “Hi”; the ‘hi’ people often use as the first message of a conversation in online chat, the same ‘Hi.’ That “Hi” is a productivity killer, a waste of time, and an unnecessary formality that does not suit today’s remote-enabled chatting modes. The Game Of Hi And Seek Have you ever started your work day to see a “Hi” from a random person on the office chat? You naturally respond…

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Post-Interview: Converting Candidates into Employees

February 7, 2023 Nikhil Wanpal Comments 1 comment

The Problem How often has it happened that you go through the pains of selecting the best fitting candidate for the role you have in your Company, offering them the best salary you can afford, and yet they do not turn up on the joining date? How often has it happened that you have gone through the painstakingly long and challenging interview process, got the offer that met your expectation, but still continued to interview with other companies, mainly because…

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Scrum is not Agile!

January 16, 2023 Nikhil Wanpal Comments 1 comment

Scrum is not Agile! There, I said it! Okay, okay, before you all bring out the pitchforks, please allow me to explain what I mean: Scrum is not the same as Agile, Or Scrum is not the only Agile framework; there are many more Agile frameworks, and one should not use the words Agile and Scrum interchangeably; Or one should not assume Scrum when someone says Agile. That’s all, that’s all I am saying. (Yes, the title is a clickbait!)…

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Feature Flags

December 17, 2022 Nikhil Wanpal Comments 0 Comment

I take it that most people, by now, know what Feature Flags are. The interesting thing, though, is that depending on whom you ask, they’ll have a slightly different answer as they have a slightly different use for the flags. The UX designers see them as a way to test users’ responses to various interface choices and flows. Similarly, an advertiser will tell you that they use Feature Flags to test audiences’ responses to different campaigns. For software developers, they…

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