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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Tech leads and developers have a vital role to play in the design of software. But with training in the abstract world of programming, many of us lack the vocabulary to provide useful critique on, say, the aesthetics or accessibility of design. Sure, we can share our feedback as people who may use it, but […]

While I was browsing Hacker News, I came across a blog post by Dan Slimmon explaining something he called “do-nothing scripting.” The premise of a “do-nothing script” is that it does nothing other than tell the user what to do at each step of a process. These types of scripts are great for helping communicate […]