Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live — John WoodsWriting clean code isn’t hard, but sometimes getting a piece of code to work right can get in the way of making it maintainable. Unfortunately, as…
The Art of Writing Defensive Documentation Always write as if your reader is lazy, stupid, and mean… My 9th grade English teacher gave me that piece of advice nearly twenty years ago, and it has shaped the way I’ve thought about writing ever since. Defensive DocumentationLet’s face it,…
Prioritizing documentation can be a struggle at any organization but, in my personal experience, a well-crafted documentation strategy can make that struggle seem far less real. Included below is a template I have personally used to propose and promote good documentation standards in the past. While it is far from…
Raise your hand if you’ve ever read a README file. Now, keep that hand raised if you’ve ever written a README file. I’m going to take a shot in the dark and assume that your hand is still raised; at least, it’s raised in spirit, since…
About a year ago, I came across an Asus Internet Radio (Air) at a local Goodwill and, despite knowing nothing about it, felt that I just had to have it. Well… it should come as no surprise to anyone that, out of the box, it didn’t actually work. None…
As developers, we like to think of source code as a recipe. All the steps are written out, so understanding code is as simple as reading those steps. But that’s not the way it really works, is it? Programming is an art form, and programmers each have their own…
I’m not gonna lie… it took me a while to adopt Docker. A devout Vagrant follower, Docker just didn’t feel mature enough to me until very recently, but boy have I seen the light. As a development environment, Docker has completely replaced Vagrant for me, but what really…
A couple years ago, I was working on a monolithic Ruby on Rails codebase that was fast approaching unmaintainability. In a month-long sprint of desperation, we hit the books and decided to come up with a plan. The solution to our problem arrived in the form of ActiveInteraction, a Ruby…