Development Practices

Most Recent

Considerations When Submitting a PR to Open-Source Projects

Committing to open source projects on GitHub can improve the quality of the development experience and elevate your understanding of project tooling.

Development Practices

Review Pull Requests Confidently

As a new dev, I needed a process for reviewing pull requests that allowed me to feel confident. Here are four questions I ask for every PR I review.

Development Practices

A Checklist for Documenting Your Public-Facing API

Here, I'll walk through the different forms of public-facing API documentation and developer tools that we added at different phases of the project.

Development Practices

3 Steps to Creating Spikes with Lasting Value

Spikes are great for exploring and de-risking problems. I'll outline three steps I take to make sure that spikes have lasting value for a software project.

Development Practices

Don’t Be Afraid to Reevaluate the Backlog

A month or so into an engagement, we came across a story that took much longer than our estimate suggested. This experience made us reevaluate the backlog.

Development Practices

Applying Lessons from Learning a Foreign Language to Software Development

Going from humanities to STEM was a challenge. However, there were lessons I learned from studying a foreign language that apply to software development.

Development Practices

Beware the Invisible Null

You have probably heard null described as the billion-dollar mistake. But null itself is not bad. Making null invisible is what tends to cause issues.

Development Practices

How to Prepare for a Product Launch, Part 3: What Will You Do?

Your team will be stronger for it if you can discuss the problems that do come up with a sense of grace and an eye for improvement rather than shame.

Development Practices

How to Prepare for a Product Launch, Part 2: How Will You Know?

So you’re staring down a big product launch. Instead of watching your [unit] tests fail, how might you monitor the way your launch issues manifest?

Development Practices

How to Prepare for a Product Launch, Part 1: What Could Go Wrong?

If you need to quell your nerves, start by making your best assessment of the types of issues that could come up after the product launch.

Development Practices

Use Github’s Saved Replies to Supercharge Your Code Reviews

One of my favorite tips for making pull request reviews more useful, efficient, and enjoyable is Github's "Saved replies."

Development Practices

Development category

Other Categories

Keep up with our latest posts.