Development Practices

Most Recent

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

WebDriver Testing Fun Times: When Threes Didn’t Exist

Checking the version of your software and the change log can lead to some very important discoveries. It might even lead you to the solution right away.

Development Practices

Five Build Commands to Make Project Onboarding Faster & Easier

New team members should be able to jump in and run your project in 10 minutes, flat. So the next time you start a new project, write your Makefile first.

Development Practices

Six Strategies to Spend Less Time Debugging

Sometimes time pressures require a shot-in-the-dark solution. But your codebase will be healthier if you understand the root cause of the issue.

Development Practices

How Do You Know When to Refactor Your Code?

It's really rewarding to get a chunk of code refactored, but it comes at a price; time spent refactoring is time you aren't developing features.

Development Practices

Development category

Other Categories

Keep up with our latest posts.