A few years ago, I picked up this 1941 Royal Arrow typewriter at the local antique store. Originally, the plan for this beautiful piece of machinery was to use it to decorate my home office, but then 2020 happened. A few months into this godawful year, I picked my typewriter...
I’m a huge fan of shortcuts.
Nobody ever said it’s easy to write clean code. Successful software development isn’t just about making software work; it’s about making sure it will continue to work. While hardly an exciting objective, code maintainability is one of the most important elements of any application.
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 about what they are,...
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.
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live — John Woods
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.
Posted on February 12, 2020
writing
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 you probably refuse to...
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 of...
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 unique...
