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.
Engineering 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.
Personal 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.
Sociotechnical systems 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 you have them do it offline and just show the results. Then you
Process Featured 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 was basically the antithesis of everything I ever advocate for. I was mostly trying not to just
Process Featured 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 a competent for loop given a day or two of training. The difference between that
Javascript 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 strings are amazing. Classes are ok. Arrow functions are nice. Native promises took long enough. These are
Sociotechnical systems 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 exclusive to large companies. They are rather hallmarks of a mature one. But, it has been my
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? And it's descriptive. What is
Sociotechnical systems 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 was at a very large financial company. I won't say which one, but
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 and components that you can mix and match to suit your taste. I wanted to
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 that I find promises to be the best mechanism for handling asynchronicity. Request-promise
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 be true. Right? Either way, I'll add my two cents. I should say up front
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 purposes. The two that come most immediately to mind are testing, and experimentation. Dependency injection
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 something that an organization can become better at, with practice. All
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 the kinds of tests that provide the most value. And specifically that means
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: Survival Evolved. I'm not actually here to talk about games, so I'
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 your manager, and instead bring solutions. Or more generally, focus on
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 job title would most likely be Software Engineer in Test (SET)
