The Competitive Advantage of Craftsmanship, Voldemort's Hadoop Usage and Other Must Reads

LinkedIn Engineers are asking big questions and sharing their personal answers. From apprentice mentorship to open source citizenship to software craftsmanship, the following writers tackle the real life issues they face each day. Check out this week’s roundup of some of the best pieces published on our platform.

Notes on "Clean Code" – Foreword
By Mohamed El-Geish, Software Engineering Manager
Mohamed shares his thoughts on the foreword of Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. He appreciates how the text highlights the importance of making code as perfect as possible while balancing the competing interest of shipping solutions quickly.

Don't Alienate Open Source Contributors
By Tim Jurka, Engineering Manager of Content Recommendations
Tim talks about an important lesson he learned when he worked with an open source project. Because open source projects consist almost always of a community of volunteers, good manners and respect for others are vitally important to getting along.

Software Artisans: Craftsmanship as a Competitive Advantage
By Donnie Flood, Director of Software Engineering
Donnie emphasizes the importance of craftsmanship when creating software, suggesting that taking a little more time and care on the front-end can save future headaches. He also notes how a workspace devoted to craftsmanship can create a more enjoyable environment for employees.

Slashing Voldemort's Hadoop Resource Usage
By Felix GV, Data Infrastructure Engineer
Felix details improvements made to Voldemort’s Read-Only Build and Push process that improved its efficiency by decreasing Hadoop resource usage. In particular, the changes affected the Reducer per Bucket feature, the replica-building process, and job configuration.

Natural Selection and Information Retrieval - Part 2 (F measure)
By Utkarsh Contractor, Software Engineering Manager
Utkarsh explains the nitty-gritty details about a specific aspect of Information Retrieval (text searches such as Google) called the F measure, which attempts to balance the trade-off between precision (% of selected items that are correct) and recall (% of correct items that are selected) in the search results.