Development

Four Ways to Make Maintenance Dev. Work Less of a Chore

Doing maintenance work on a codebase isn’t very glamorous, and it isn’t always much fun, but it’s an important piece of building lasting software. Everyone loves working on so-called greenfield projects because they can let their creativity run wild. Adding features and fixing bugs in a system that’s already been built doesn’t seem to generate […]

How to Prototype Quickly: Six Tips for Light-Speed Programming

I’ve completed a few projects that involved prototyping software in a very short timeframe. This situation can differ drastically from the normal pace of agile projects because results and certainty have to be prioritized above long-term considerations. If you find yourself in a situation where you need to push code out quickly (and won’t be […]

Six More JetBrains Shortcuts & How to Combine Them for a Better Workflow

Two years ago, a coworker wrote a Spin post on Seven JetBrains shortcuts. Once you get used to using them and combining them, they significantly improve workflow. So here are a few more I find useful, plus how you can use them together. More JetBrains Shortcuts Duplicate with ⌘D ⌘D is useful when you have […]

Writing Better Test CLI Commands with Laravel and Artisan

Laravel’s Artisan CLI comes with a plethora of useful commands and functionality out of the box. Unfortunately, there’s one thing it doesn’t come with: an easy way to run different types of tests. On a recent project, our team had a desire to write Artisan commands that could run our tests, so we had one […]

Why I Don’t Use Classes

Recently, one of my teammates noted that our project’s codebase doesn’t have a lot of classes. The observation wasn’t framed positively or negatively. It was just an observation about a particular code style of the team as a whole. I didn’t think much about it at the time. But looking back, this observation has lead […]