Development Practices

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Three Tips for Building a Long-Term, Sustainable Project

Help your future self and others by ensuring your project is sustainable over the long term by using these three simple tips.

Development Practices

Designing a Scalable Deployment Pipeline

Designing an effective and scalable deployment pipeline is the top priority of a product engineering team—even over choosing a language or tech stack.

Development Practices

Open Source Basics: NPM Edition

Tips for making changes to third-party dependencies and contributing them upstream, using npm and git—though you can use other languages' packaging systems.

Development Practices

Tech Debt Isn’t What You Think It Is

We need to stop taking a sprint to "deal with tech debt," and start taking time to "implement the lessons we've learned over the past X sprints."

Development Practices

Help Your Fellow Developers with Well-Worded Error Messages

Write error messages that won't make readers think. A good error message should both point out a problem in your code and indicate a solution.

Development Practices

Your Database is Underutilized

Use your relational database management system to its full potential to process data, describe domain logic, and take action when data changes.

Development Practices

The Tradeoff of Multiple Repositories

There are real costs involved in the decision to have a development team work in multiple repositories—I believe these costs are always overlooked.

Development Practices

Be Explicit with Your API’s Data

When designing APIs, why you should be explicit about state when crossing system boundaries.

Development Practices

Capability Feature Flags for Backward Compatibility

Use "feature flags" to improve code that needs to maintain backward compatibility with an external API, device, OS, or hardware version.

Development Practices

Four Tips To Keep Refactoring Efficient

Four tips for efficient refactoring: have good test coverage, refactor on a main branch, keep tests green often, remember your purpose.

Development Practices

Test-Driven Development for the Uninitiated

This introduction to TDD is for developers who think test-driven development is a good idea, but don't yet feel like it will work for them.

Development Practices

Learning from Pokémon GO: The Importance of Testing

How Pokémon GO and its early bugs highlight the importance of high-quality code releases through testing and why quick releases aren't always ideal.

Development Practices

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