Engineering Designing for Testability The same factors that make your software hard to test will also make it hard to maintain. By adding tests, you can find and fix those things, and so the simple fact of having tests will make your software projects more successful.
Personal Falsehoods programmers believe about gender (and sex) Sex and gender are complicated. If you want my advice, it's that your app probably doesn't even need to collect this information.
C# Maybe don't use StringBuilder So, should you use StringBuilder? Yes, sometimes. It depends on what your data is like, and what you're optimizing for.
Engineering Enabling Refactoring To succeed at refactoring, you need to make small, incremental improvements. It needs to be continuous. It needs to be habitual. And it needs to be proactive. Because it's not special; it's just a regular part of development. This is continuous refactoring.
Testing Unit Testing: How do I even? It hopefully seems obvious that you should test your software. And in particular that you should unit test your software. But, why? And, how? For some reason no one seems to teach this.
Projects What language should I learn? Programming languages are tools used to solve problems, not problems themselves that need to be solved. And so learning to use them should be approached in the same way you would learn to use any other tool. Which is to say: it depends on what you're trying to build.
Projects New Year's Resolutions This list is optimistic. Maybe even naively so. I'm okay with that. This is about learning, and there's a lot to learn.
Culture The worst interview homework ever I completely get the point of interview homework. You need to assess whether a candidate can actually do the job you're hiring for. Whether they're even viable. And your time is valuable, so
Process Measuring Risk A while back, I was in a planning meeting where a whole development organization was trying to squeeze a huge and non-negotiable volume of work into a predetermined and non-negotiable release schedule. It
Process Software Engineer I am a software engineer. What I'm not is a programmer, or a developer, or a coder, or a ninja. Simply writing code is the easiest part of developing software. Anyone can write
Node.js Think twice before using async/await There is a lot to like about modern Javascript (often abbreviated as ES 2015). Static imports are great. Rest/Spread syntax is great. Destructuring assignment is pretty good. Default arguments are great. Template
Culture Some things I DO miss about big companies I previously discussed some things about working in a large organization that I was happy to be rid of. This is the other side of that coin. These things are by no means
Process A Bug's Life I've written before about useful metrics for software development organizations, and it's past time for another. The metric I'm proposing now, I call "A Bug's Life". Because who doesn't like Pixar?
Culture What I don't miss about big companies Update Sep 2017: I later wrote about some of the good parts. After you're done here, you should check that out, too. I got a new job recently. Go me! The old job
Projects A First Date With Python I started playing Endless Sky recently. It has a lot to recommend it; if you like 4X games, it's worth checking out. One of its features is a fairly rich array of ships
Projects Request-as-promise I've been working on a small node.js project lately to promise-ify request. I'm calling it request-as-promise. You can install it via npm with npm i --save request-as-promise. Why The short version is
Process A Note on the Daily Standup Apparently, (scrum) standup meetings are broken. It seems that way at least, because making suggestions for how to fix them seems to be a seminal favorite topic in programmer blogs; so it must
Projects Require-with Require-with is a project I've recently been working on. The main purpose of the module is to enable simple dependency injection in Node.js. Dependency injection can be great for a number of
Process Software development metrics Software development is a skill. And for the moment, I mean that in an institutional sense. It's a skill the organization has. It's something that an organization can be good at. And it's
Testing Testing needs a better vocabulary If you build or test software, you've almost certainly seen some variant of the Test Pyramid. The basic concept it's trying to communicate is sound, and that is: focus your testing resources on
Projects I made a thing; let me tell you about it I play video games, and I like it when my friends play with me. So to enable that, I host a dedicated server for us. The game I'm particularly interested in is Ark:
Process (How to) Be Solution Oriented There's a piece of advice I've often heard regarding being successful in your job. Actually there are a lot, but the one I'm think of is that you should not bring problems to
Testing Software Engineer in Test Update: I'm actually a Sofware Engineer now. But everything else holds up. I'm a software engineer, working mostly to support testing other software. I don't work at Google, but if I did, my
