Any solution to a problem involves trade-offs. One of my managers a long time ago used to be fond of saying some variation of There are an infinite number of solutions to a problem. A subset of those will work. A subset of those will work well. A subset of those are actually worth doing.… Read More »
A recent article ‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth hit a couple of points that I have been explaining to people for years. Although the author makes a few interesting points, he misses several more. The author describes a system written using a “database as a service” system with little to no code, that solves… Read More »
Git makes working with branches extremely easy. Especially compared to many of the version control systems that came before it. This has resulted in a standard workflow involving feature branches. The idea is to branch from master when you begin developing a new feature. You do all of your development on that branch. When the… Read More »
If you work as a developer, you probably spend a large amount of time in your editor. You are adding features, improving tests, looking for bugs, reviewing changes, and otherwise looking at the code. When I started programming, screens were a lot smaller and almost no one had space on their desk for more than… Read More »
As I said in my last post, many of the language communities that I interact with now are fond of asserting that their particular community does a wonderful job of testing, documentation, or both. This time, I’d like to examine the claims on documentation. Once upon a time, all of the documentation for a language… Read More »
Many of the language communities that I interact with now are fond of asserting that their particular community does a wonderful job of testing, documentation, or both. Most languages come with very good testing frameworks, and have libraries (or modules, gems, or crates) for even more. (Going forward I’m just going to use the term… Read More »
Long ago when I began programming, most programs were standalone executables. Back in those days, almost all programs were run from a command line or executed by clicking on an icon on a GUI. This was before the web existed and most people didn’t even have dial-up access. Things are very different today, with many… Read More »
Clean Agile: Back to BasicsRobert C. MartinPrentice Hall, 2019 Bob Martin begins this book by describing it as his personal recollections, rather than a work of research. He starts by pointing out that agile software development started as a way of describing what had worked for some small development teams working on reasonably small projects.… Read More »
In a previous post, I spoke a bit about why to you might want to learn vim. Despite the fact that I prefer vim as my programming editor, I would never argue that everyone should use it. For some of people, vim meshes with the way they think. In my case, it wasn’t an immediate… Read More »
The writing of standalone tools is an underappreciated part of software development.