-
Tabs vs Spaces: Are we even arguing about the same thing?
The big news this week (other than all that political news) is objective data in the ongoing battle of Tabs vs Spaces. Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey uncovered an interesting correlation: collectively, devs who use spaces are earn more than those who use tabs. That is sure to add some fire to never-ending war, but…
-
My Favorite Bug
Years ago, at a financial services company… It started with some mild grumbling. Some people were complaining about getting signed out on our customer portal. But it was probably just user error, right? The reports seemed to happen more and more though. Then, employees who worked on the product started to get signed out. At…
-
Keeping up with “modern web technology”
Something I was told the other day at work, blew my mind. "Don't use new modern web technology because it'll be too difficult to support." — 🛸 👻 👣 Chris D. | Dev Advocate (@saltnburnem) October 19, 2016 Chris has a pretty good point. When you sign up to be a developer, you are signing…
-
Testing Code: Intentional vs. Incidental Behavior
Sometimes a maintenance programmer is another developer with an axe. Sometimes the maintenance programmer is ourselves after we have forgotten all about the project. I want whoever gets it to be happy and confident when they make changes. Having inherited projects in the past (both from others and from past-George), I think it’s important to…
-
Towards an understanding of technical debt – Laughing Meme
I’ve spent the last few years rather flippantly stating, “Technical debt doesn’t exist.” What I was trying to say was, “I’m deeply uncomfortable with how our industry talks about this thing, I think it’s probably harmful, but I don’t know quite how to express what I mean. Also, given that everyone seems to be really…
-
Ubuntu on Windows
Windows 10 Anniversary Update came out last week. I haven’t heard very many folks talking about one of the most interesting features I’ve seen from the New Microsoft: Linux. I think part of the reason people aren’t excited is because they don’t understand what this is: It’s not a virtual machine It’s not a container like…
-
Paul Ford’s What Is Code?
What is Code? This may be the best novella about computers since In The Beginning Was The Command Line, and it’s certainly more relevant. It touched on a lot of my experiences as a person who writes code. It’s also got a great Konami code easter egg (among others).
-
Yahoo! Pipes 😭
.@lmorchard going old school with Yahoo! Pipes at #selfconf pic.twitter.com/A2hiiYCYUh — George Hotelling wants a carbon tax (@revgeorge) May 30, 2015 I just deleted a draft I wrote about Yahoo! Pipes closing because Reflections on the Closure of Yahoo Pipes says it all. looking back, it seems to me now that the whole mashup thing…
-
Passing configuration to Angular
This is something that we got wrong on our project initially, then had a guy named Mark come on board and nail a very clean solution. What we were trying to accomplish: we wanted to give our Angular Singe Page App some configuration data for initialization. Things like a CSRF token and API URL, so…
-
Sprint length… do you think it is ever a good idea to go to 1 week sprints?
A friend sent me the above question about sprint lengths over Twitter but I think some other people might want to know my answer too. A question like that doesn’t have a clear cut answer, it’s more of an open-ended question that can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” But the answer is…