Programming is an art of mathematical precision - Sotiris Fanou.

How AI Chat Assistants Are Revolutionizing Technical Support In today’s digital era, customers expect instant, accurate technical support - no more waiting on hold, no more frustrated callers. Industries like ISPs, Mobile Network providers, and Cable TV companies are feeling the pressure as demand for 24/7, scalable support surges. Enter AI Chat Assistants Powered by advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, AI-powered chatbots can be fed with your device manuals and technical documents. Once trained, they provide instantaneous, accurate guidance, whether instructing a user to “change a Wi-Fi router password” or “enable roaming mode on a phone” all around the clock. Proven Benefits of AI-Powered Support 24/7 scalability: AI assistants can handle unlimited simultaneous ...

Software design: underrated and not practiced  As a result of my long career in Information Technology (IT) I have made some important observations regarding software development. One of those observations is that quite a lot of software development teams, in companies both big and small, jump directly to the software implementation part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) skipping software design. These software teams may sometimes have a very quick talk about the system architecture accompanied by a quick drawing on a whiteboard. This drawing may stay on the board for a few weeks or longer but it is finally erased. Other times software design is skipped completely jumping directly to coding. Skipping software design is a serious neglect with negative consequences on the quality of the software system produced. Early in my career, many years ago, during my first few days of employment as a software developer in a new company, they asked me to change part of an existing ...

  For software design to work developers must be able to read, change and create software design diagrams. However, most developers do not know and do not like UML. UML is indeed too detailed, difficult to learn and not intuitive. The C4 model is intuitive and easy to learn.

The Importance of Code Comments and Documentation: A Pillar of Software Engineering Throughout my professional life, I have encountered thousands upon thousands of lines of code with no comments at all. A growing number of developers today believe that code comments and documentation are outdated practices, relics of an earlier era in programming. Some argue that well-written code should be self-documenting and that comments are redundant or even misleading. While there is some merit to the idea of writing expressive, clean code, the notion that comments and documentation are unnecessary is seriously flawed. It disregards one of the foundational principles of software engineering: abstraction . Abstraction and the Role of Comments In software engineering, abstraction is the purposeful hiding of certain details of a system in order to highlight others. According to Liskov and Guttag (2001), abstraction simplifies systems by modeling complex be...

The Most Common Mistake Software Development Organizations Make Over the course of my career as a software engineer and consultant, I have worked with a wide variety of organizations, from nimble startups to sprawling enterprises. Despite differences in size, industry, and tools used, I have noticed a recurring and troubling pattern: a majority of these organizations consistently neglect one of the most fundamental aspects of software development, maintaining structured, well-designed, and well-documented code. I estimate that at least two-thirds of the organizations I have worked with make this same critical mistake. They focus almost exclusively on output and delivery deadlines, often under the umbrella of Agile methodologies, but fail to ensure that the code being produced is clean, maintainable, and well-understood. The Consequences of Neglecting Code Quality When teams skip esse...

Bottom-Up Design: The Best Way to Refactor Messed-Up Code Throughout my career in software development, I've encountered a recurring challenge: inheriting codebases that are messy, disorganized, and fragile. The common impulse in such situations is to suggest a full rewrite. While this might sound appealing at first, it is usually the wrong move. The smarter, more sustainable approach is to introduce design to the existing mess. Not by imposing a grand vision from above, but by letting the code itself guide you. This is what I call bottom-up design , and it is, in my opinion, the best way to refactor a problematic codebase. Why Rewriting Often Fails Rewriting an existing system from scratch is a massive undertaking. You lose all the small decisions and hidden logic that exist in the current system. Even worse, you now have to develop and maintain two systems in parallel: the old one that’s still in use, and the new one trying to catch up. As...

Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS): Why Simplicity in Code is a Sign of Great Engineering As software engineers, we often face a dilemma: should we showcase our skills by writing intricate, highly optimized, and sometimes cryptic code, or should we prioritize clarity, simplicity, and ease of understanding? Too often, developers lean toward the former, believing that writing complex code demonstrates sophistication and intelligence. However, true craftsmanship in software development lies in simplicity, maintainability, and empathy for the next person who will read your code, which might be you six months from now. The Essence of KISS The KISS principle, originally coined by the U.S. Navy in 1960, stands for "Keep It Simple, Stupid." It advocates for simplicity as a core design principle, warning against unnecessary complexity. In software development, this translates to writing code that is straightforward, easy to read, and easy to modify. Code si...