I have no idea how many different hobbyist software projects I’ve started and abandoned over the course of my life. Let’s just take an average guess and say I’ve worked on 3 side projects each year since 1987 when I started programming for fun. That’d put the number at 96 […]
Ever have a presentation get off on the wrong foot or an intended point completely miss the mark? I sure have. Let’s backtrack a few months and look at how I failed and 6 steps I now follow to keep getting better. I was giving a monthly training presentation to […]
We suck at testing our own code. We suck so badly at it that it has led to entire professions like as Quality Assurance analysts and test engineers. Why is that? How do you take some of the smartest people out there and find some of the most glaring omissions and defects?
I’m not an extrovert. I don’t like crowds. I’d rather be the trusted adviser than the guy in the spotlight. In high school, speech class gave me such anxiety that I was physically sick and needed to give the presentation over my lunch hour directly to the teacher. So, how […]
How can you possibly perform well in this type of environment — either right out of college, boot camp, or even potentially self-taught? The good news is that we do not expect you to know everything day one. Expectations on junior team levels are fairly narrow.
What does a classic business book have to say about developers and impostor syndrome? My wife and I listened to the first half of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outlier’s on Audible today on a road trip. The book studies successful individuals and the factors that make them successful. One of the factors […]
Together, these tools help you analyze software quality and come up with effective visuals for communicating them to others in ways that can be easily understood.
This is a bit of a different post, but I wanted to share my experience with a rare neurological condition known as Guillain Barre Syndrome (GBS) in case it might be helpful to anyone. Specifically, I want to focus on my long road to recovery, transitioning out of the workforce […]
Unit tests are often treated like second class citizens and not given the same level of polish and refactoring as our production code. As a result, they can wind up brittle, unclear, and hard to maintain. In this article, I’m going to show you a few tricks to keep your […]
Want it or dread it, sometimes as developers we move from individual contributor to a team lead or management type of role. This is a drastic shift in skills needed and one frequently done without official training. How do we improve our chances of success when others are on the […]
