Four Techniques for Making Sense of Legacy Code

At some point or another, many developers will need to confront legacy code. The difficulty of this task can vary drastically, depending on several factors. If the codebase is relatively small and developers who have actively worked on it are available, it might not be that painful to figure out what is going on. However, […]

Maintaining Consistency Across Devices with Flutter

A few months ago, I shared my excitement about Flutter, Google’s new portable UI-toolkit. I have continued to spend time learning Flutter outside of work, and it has been a lot of fun but left me wanting more. One of my favorite parts about learning something new is figuring out how I can leverage it […]

Three Ways to Use Emoji for Faster Debugging

Debugging is one of the most frustrating and painful things a developer will go through. Maybe the debugger isn’t working correctly, or the stack trace is uninformative, or maybe the code base is large and unfamiliar. Regardless of the specific problem, the goal is always the same: figure out the source of the problem and […]

Two Strategies for a Successful git-bisect

It’s likely you have heard about git-bisect plenty of times before. Hopefully, it’s not a tool that you need to reach for often, since it essentially indicates that there’s something wonky or broken, and your best hope for identifying the actual problem is to look back in time. Despite this, sometimes git-bisect is the right […]

Simple Skew-Normal PRNG in JavaScript

The basic JavaScript Math.Random returns values with an approximately uniform distribution. While this is often sufficient, many situations require normal distributions. Some situations may be even better served by an approximately normal, but asymmetric, distribution. These are known as skew-normal distributions.

Lessons Learned from Deploying Outside my Comfort Zone

If your team hasn’t yet reached the utopia of a fully automated deployment pipeline, you likely have a series of steps or scripts that you perform for every deployment. Perhaps this process is documented somewhere, or maybe (more likely) it’s just passed down from developer to developer through tribal knowledge.

Keep Your Product Owner in the Loop with Intermediate Deliverables

It’s ideal to write stories that can deliver a feature, end-to-end, all at once. But sometimes–especially when integrating with new systems, dealing with complex data processing, or working with a complex story dependency graph—it makes more sense to break up the work so you can deliver each story as its own link in a long […]

The Hazards of Transactional Test Isolation

These days, it’s standard practice to run your unit and system tests with some degree of parallelism. When doing so, it’s important to ensure that the code being tested doesn’t interfere with other running tests. Usually, this comes down to the database layer. There are a few options for accomplishing isolation at the database layer. […]

Bake Production Testing into Your Application

Unit testing, integration testing, acceptance testing, exploratory testing—all are important methods that contribute to delivering quality software. But there’s another important kind of testing that is often overlooked, and that’s testing the production environment. For example, has the production environment been configured correctly so the system can successfully send email? Can the system access a […]

“Well, I’m not a designer…” – Five Ideas for Devs Making Design Decisions

Most software projects have an established visual design: colors, layout, typography, etc. It’s typically one of the first things to be set up. But the product is going to change and evolve. Maybe a new button needs to be added. Or a link, or a metric, or some other widget. While a designer often leads […]

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