Development Practices

Most Recent

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

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

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

Development Practices

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

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

Development Practices

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

Development Practices

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

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

Command Injection can present a serious vulnerability, allowing attackers to run commands in the shell. This video covers how to defend against it.

Development Practices

Debugging legacy application is never easy, but you can make understanding it less of a chore by adding a unit test. Includes rationale and examples.

Development Practices

We talk a lot about what we do before and during projects, but what about when that's all done? What's important when a project is over?