- Find the Hook So you’re working on a brown-field system. It was written before you arrived, by people long since gone, and it interacts with other systems that are even older. Congratulations, welcome to the part of the software world that makes money.
- Standups - Why I prefer to walk the board Standups - loved, hated, and much discussed. Like most processes, standup format is a sidenote. A healthy team can make any format work, and an unhealthy team won’t be saved by process.
- The Full-Stack Center of Gravity New technology! Write your entire webapp in the best language, without messing around in some other terrible environment. I’m referring, of course, to React server components. Or I’m referring to Hotwire. Whether you love Javascript or hate it, you can be a “full-stack developer” and deliver a modern experience, in your preferred environment.
- Charitable Giving 2019 So it’s the end of the year, when we all gather together and appreciate the true meaning of the season - tax deductions. Oh, and also peace, goodwill, and all that jazz.
- Meta Opinions, Mostly Held If you’re in the software industry, you’ve probably heard the expression “strong opinions, weakly held”. If you hang around software discussion sites, you’ve probably seen the article calling it the worst idea in tech.
- Teams Do Four Things Recently there’s been a lot of hand-wringing over programmer’s oaths, user needs, and what the hell we’re doing as a profession. Eric Leong chimed in with an interesting breakdown of “product developers” and “technical developers”.
- On Hiring Developers My team is hiring.
- The Periodic Table Puzzle In a recent job interview, I got the following puzzle/algorithm question:
- Be Ruthless (but not yet) Earlier this week, this excellent piece by Chris Parker made the rounds on Hacker News.
- Weird things you cannot do Don’t name a capistrano namespace “rake”. This breaks the db:migrate task, or any other built-in task that tries to run a rake command. You’ll get a message like this:
- The origin of 20% time Six days shall thou hack, and deliver all thy features;but the seventh day is a sabbath unto Quality of thy Code; in it thou shall not deliver any business value, nor thy tester, nor thy project manager, thy senior developer nor thy junior developer, nor any consultant or contractor that is within thy company.
- New gem: Mixable Engines Just published a new gem for my day job: Mixable Engines.
- RIP, faithful phone I am the least gadget-whoring programmer that I know.
- Code and Money - a gap in the medium term In software development, we’ve got tools for planning the short run. Unit tests tell me what code to implement right now. Daily task lists tell me what to work on today. GTD helps to manage my week.
- $30/hr Java Coders are not Photography In the beginning, there were painters. They were artists and chroniclers of reality.
- TDD Survey Results I gave a lightning talk at RubyNation called “TDD in the real world”, mostly as an excuse to poll the audience about testing practices.
- Engines and routes - a simple solution So the new Engines feature in Rails 2.3 is great, but there’s one big problem with the way it handles routes. The routes in all of your engines are loaded before your application routes. This is a big problem if your engines have a catch-all default route for a CMS-type thing.
