Sunday 4 January 2015

Career safety checkpoint

As another year begins, I found myself struggling to get to sleep before the first day back at work.  This wasn't a new experience for me as I seem to recall the same sort of nervousness before the first day back at school as a child.

I consider this time of year to be a bit like travelling between very different timezones - just as I have gotten accustomed to going to bed late and sleeping late the following morning, it's time to adjust back to the work life routine.

One of the many thoughts that occurred to me when I should have been blissfully sleeping was whether my skills are still as relevant to my chosen career in software development.

In the morning I woke up early and decided to have a look at some source code from a system that my current project will be interacting with...

A section of code that particularly stood out to me involved something like 12 branches of if / else checks, where each comparison was against a constant defined earlier in the class, and each outcome also involved another constant.  This could easily be condensed down to two or three lines with one conditional expression by replacing all of the constants with a single Map.

I'm sleeping much better.

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