“You should strike,” he said. We were laying in bed, catching up on the day's news when I saw an article for a general strike being organized to bring awareness to the contributions of women, both at work and at home. I mentioned it to my husband, Scott, who is also my business partner. Or as he likes to point out, I'm technically his boss as I'm the majority shareholder.
In my last blog post, I explained why metaphors are so important and how they can help raise our chops (and our hopes) when it comes to influencing the business side of things. The Seat Belt metaphor used in my previous example may have worked great for some, but not for others. Keeping a few different ones at the ready helps you adapt on-the-fly and better connect with whomever you’re speaking with. Another one of my favorite car metaphors to use is inspections.
I'm getting very comfortable with Hyper-V on my Windows 10 Pro machine, and I'm really happy I have this as a development environment. After updating Corgibytes' Chief Code Whisperer, Scott, about where I was at for a current client, we talked about remote machines and Azure. This lead to attempting to upload a VHD to Azure.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one... After spending years understanding the inefficiencies of a marketspace, a brilliant subject-matter expert strikes out on their own as an entrepreneur. Using their grit, knowledge and connections, they build their business. Soon after, investors and paying clients follow to benefit from the new product.
A commenter on dev.to recently posed the question, “What should someone without a computer science degree focus on learning?” As someone who was lucky enough to know I wanted to study computer science as an 18-year-old, I thought I’d weigh in on the topic. I had some ideas floating in my head about what I considered most important, but also decided I’d poll my colleagues to get their opinions.
One of the most mundane and frightening tasks for many developers is writing integration tests. It's a time-consuming, fragile, and often difficult and frustrating task to accomplish. What makes it even worse is that it quickly gets out of hand and breaks often, which leads to frustration and dropping the idea completely.
Does this sound familiar? A nervous, yet wildly confident singer prepares to wow competition judges. Meanwhile, a clip of them telling the camera some heart-wrenching story wraps up. The frame ends on some mention of this being their last chance at happiness, and this is their Hail Mary plan to finally follow their destiny. The music starts. The singer wails.
Code refactoring, as defined by Wikipedia, is “the process of restructuring existing computer code — changing the factoring — without changing its external behavior.” As such, refactored code should introduce no behavior changes. Otherwise, you're not refactoring. You're refactoring and doing something else.
A while back, I wrote a blog post about IDEs vs text editors. Ultimately, I was really writing about whether using an IDE made me less of a software developer. My conclusion was that while it definitely didn't make me less of a software developer, there were things experienced software developers did that I wasn't doing that were worth learning. So I've been trying to do what it takes to earn the right to call myself a “software developer.” I've learned a lot in the process: about shortcuts, vim and bash, but, mostly, about myself.
Recently, I was on the STEMxm podcast, where the host asked me a simple question: “You’re a woman in tech, you’re also a business owner and you have small children. Do you have any thoughts on the balance question and managing all of this?” Let’s first address the maternal bias that comes with just asking the question. Scott never gets asked how he “does it all” as a father, but I do all the time as a mother.