Weekly Commit #011

Remember the backend bug from last week? The saga is over.

The saga ends

I started the week with the background service working, but a new flow routed data through another service and some of it was getting lost mid-flow, something I spotted at the end of last week. This week I fixed that bug, and mid-implementation I decided the state belonged in a different service than where I had built it. That meant a new endpoint, regenerating the API client, and reworking code I had just finished. Annoying? Yes. Right call? Also yes. The architecture is cleaner now.

Smaller things this week

A ticket asked me to remove a phrase from a modal. My first instinct was to add a conditional flag. Before doing it, I checked the call sites. The modal was only used in one place. Simple deletion, no flag needed. Verify reuse before adding complexity. I also had some other frontend tickets where my main struggle right now is finding where the code actually lives. I feel like I have been improving though.

Redesigning a page on our mobile app, I hit one of MAUI's pain points, one I had encountered before: Android vs iOS. The spacing between elements on the page differed between the two platforms, so after the redesign, the next task was making the page look the same on both.

I also started a new task: an "Em análise" state that merges two internal states into a single status the user can actually understand. My first version put the mapping logic in the wrong service, it compiled fine but returned nothing at runtime. Debugging through the layers, I found the filter was querying a completely different table than the one I had checked. The real fix? The downstream service already had a pattern for exactly this case, so the logic belongs there. Before inventing a solution, check if the codebase already has one.

Something I read this week

Addy Osmani's post "Career advice for software engineers in the AI Agent era." His core idea is that as agents make solving problems cheap, choosing the right problems and judging the results becomes the scarce skill, and "the finish is the product." It mapped to my week more than I expected. Almost none of my wins were about writing code. They were about judging where the code should live, when to skip the flag, and which pattern to follow. Agents can write the fix. Knowing which fix, and owning it when it ships, is still on us.

For all junior software engineers like me, I'd highly recommend following Addy Osmani. Two of his books are already sitting on my next-read list: Beyond Vibe Coding and The Effective Software Engineer.

Eleven weeks in

The wins are getting less about fixing bugs and more about understanding the systems around them. That feels like progress. See you next week.