Don’t Repeat Yourself, but Sometimes Repeat Yourself

Software developers are great at recognizing patterns. Maybe it’s an inherent skill that draws us to this profession. Or maybe it’s the process of writing software that develops this skill. Either way, “don’t repeat yourself” (DRY) is a natural application of this skill. However, repetition in itself is not the enemy that this principle makes […]

Visualizing Data with Vega-Lite

Have you ever wanted to quickly chart some data without coercing it into a spreadsheet? Perhaps you even want to do something mildly complex, like differentiate the data based on some facet that isn’t being charted, or have the ability to interact with multiple visualizations at once? Vega-Lite provides a lot more power than spreadsheets […]

Command Line Fuzzy Find with fzf

My first project at Atomic Object indoctrinated me into the magic of VS Code’s fuzzy find feature. It was mind-blowing to jump directly to a file by typing a rough approximation of its full name. Then, my next project found me working in Android Studio and Xcode, both of which implement similarly excellent fuzzy finders. […]

How to Develop Alone (without Making an Enormous Mess)

As a software developer, working alone can be very liberating. You can move at whatever speed you feel comfortable with. You have the freedom to explore ideas without having to explain or justify them to anyone else ahead of time. You can twist and turn — speed up or slow down. The mere presence of […]

A Beginners Guide to htop for Process Management

Are you using memory-intensive processes? Do you need to closely monitor containers and virtual systems on your computer? htop is the tool you’ve been looking for. Its color-coded display makes it easy to understand the status of your system at a glance and gives you the power to manage processes with a single keystroke. What […]

Hybrid Task and Project Management with Asana

In the past, I’ve tried out many different tools for managing tasks and projects. There’s never been one that really stood out to me as superior or one I enjoyed using all that much. But I recently gave Asana a try and was very surprised by how much I liked it. At its heart, Asana […]

Localhost to Remote in Two Commands

Do you feel too constrained by localhost? Need a quickly-deployed remote demo? Localtunnel may be the tool for you. Localtunnel is a simple tool that provides you a publicly-accessible URL that reroutes every request to your locally-running process

Setting up GitHub Actions for a React/Node Project

This week I had a chance to try out GitHub Actions — GitHub’s continuous integration solution. I was at the point in a project where I would normally turn to CircleCI, so I thought I’d give GitHub Actions a try. If it worked out, that would be one less service I’d have to sign up […]

Diagnosing and Relieving Pain in Software Development

I’ve heard the term “pain” thrown around the developer community quite a bit. This “pain” comes from the vast amount of learning every developer needs to do to evolve in an ever-changing technological landscape. There are always new languages and patterns to learn and countless legacy systems which need to be integrated. Stretching one’s knowledge […]

Developing Azure Functions in a Docker Container

Of late, I’ve become enamored with using Docker containers for anything and everything (I recently posted about doing development in a Docker container). So when I needed to do some work on a small Azure Functions project, the first thing I investigated was whether or not I could do my development/testing in a Docker container […]

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