Development Practices

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Exploding Breadcrumbs Make Life Easier for Your Future Self

Your future self will be thrilled when they encounter exploding breadcrumbs instead of a unworkable project.

Development Practices

Incrementally Building My Own Code Health Tool

It's simple to build a basic (and upgradable) tool that can help keep your code in good shape. Ours shows areas of the codebase that could be cleaned up, and it discourages committ

Development Practices

How to Back Up Your Development Environment

Creating a globally-accessible git repository to back up files, without needing to resort to symlinks or other messy methods.

Development Practices

Preparing to Launch a Rewrite for a Public-Facing Website

Having existing users and an existing infrastructure can make website relaunches very complex. You need to guard the user experience every step of the way.

Development Practices

TIME_WAIT and Your Test Suite

What it means when a socket server, in this case being used in a test suite, ends up in the TIME_WAIT state, and how to prevent it.

Development Practices

The Five Habits of Maintainable Unit Tests

Good unit tests are often the best documentation of a project's behavior. But poorly-written unit tests can cement code in place, making it more difficult to change.

Development Practices

Take Projects One Day at a Time, One Line at a Time

There’s no such thing as bad code. There’s just code that’s a poor fit for the problem today – but it probably was a good fit for the problem, knowledge, and timeframe it was writt

Development Practices

Regular Expressions Are Great… Sometimes

Before you apply regular expressions to every situation that looks like a string that needs parsing, you need to be aware of their limitations.

Development Practices

What Shape is Your Project? – Tackling Software with a High “Complexity to Visibility” Ratio

What "shape" is your project? It's not overall complexity that matters. It’s the ratio of complexity of functionality to visibility into that functionality.

Development Practices

Save Side Effects for Last

Why save side effects for last? It will make your code less buggy and easier to test (because it naturally guides you closer to functional programming).

Development Practices

Debugging a Complex Problem? Think Like an Epidemiologist

It's hard to know what's really going on inside your body, so researchers use the Bradford Hill Criteria to explore problems. Developers can use it too.

Development Practices

Today’s Code Is Tomorrow’s Legacy Project – Make It Easy to Resurrect

Getting legacy projects running again is never fun. Leave some breadcrumbs, and your colleagues & future self will thank you.

Development Practices

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