I’m a huge fan of shortcuts. Aliases, hacks, scripts, automations, workarounds… I love unnecessary optimization, so it should come as no surprise that I’m particularly fond of the alias functionality in Git—so much so that it inspired me to contribute a similar feature to the Vagrant project…
A few years ago, I checked off an item on my Open Source Bucket List when I pitched—and ultimately contributed—a brand new feature to HashiCorp’s Vagrant: command aliases. While aliases have been a core Vagrant feature for some time, there hasn’t been a lot of coverage…
I’ve never been a particularly confrontational person. In the workplace, I would much rather maintain good relationships with my coworkers than engage in endless debates over something that ultimately doesn’t benefit the product or the team. Unfortunately, software developers love to argue. Whether it is about style, tooling,…
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…