Over the past year, we’ve written a lot about empathy on this blog. We’ve discussed empathy-driven development, the empathy spectrum, and the fact that empathy is a skill. And like any skill, it can be learned and takes practice to build. But perhaps one of the most important posts was actually an update to an existing one.
As a person who has worked in enterprise software and technology for almost 20 years, I always marvel at how different this industry looks from twenty, ten, or even just five years ago. Over the last two years, the landscape has shifted for classic enterprise vendors like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft in dramatic ways, but the massive tectonic shifts we now see have only been due to the incremental changes deep below the surface for decades.
If you love old architecture and castles, you'll fall for Bratislava. Easily one of the most beautiful places you can visit in Europe, this Slovakian capital is small enough that you can drive/walk quickly to most places, but big enough to fill your schedule for a few days. It may surprise some to find out that, when it comes to software development, the area is very quickly becoming one of the European tech hubs. Last month, Bratislava hosted two big conferences in one week.
Over the years, I've heard a lot of different attitudes regarding code that’s going to be thrown away. Let me be clear here. I’m not talking about code that we think might get thrown away. I’m talking about code that we know will get thrown away.
Last Friday, I caught a friend’s band at a local pub. I know how it sounds. “A friend’s band. That’s cute.” Except it’s not like that. This friend is an exceptional guitarist. When he plays, it’s like watching Joe Satriani, Jimmy Hendrix, Slash. His instrument becomes an expression of his soul.
I recently started writing tests for an Angular application, so I had to go through the entire process of researching the tools, installing and setting up the libraries, writing the tests and learning the tricks. Here's what I discovered.
When building a feature or fixing a bug, you will be reading the code that exists. One thing I do often is ask, “Why was this done this way?” Programming is not a binary profession. Fuzzy logic would be a better way to explain how problems get solved. Just as programmers' experiences vary, you can find many solutions to get from 0 to 1. So, when I want to answer my initial question, I leverage git blame.
Is your code difficult to work with? Chances are, it’s time to get rid of code you don’t need. That can be a scary prospect, but the rewards can be well worth the effort. Recently, I was inspired by KonMari, a technique for decluttering physical spaces, to help me visualize how to refactor codebases to make them easier to work with.
Amazon OpsWorks is an excellent, low-cost option for Platform-as-a-Service hosting. OpsWorks provides relatively easy-to-use UI mechanisms to manage, deploy and host applications on AWS EC2. Corgibytes uses OpsWorks to host both Rails-based and Angular-based servers for one of our clients. Configuring the Rails-based OpsWorks hosts was easy – mostly because there are tons of blog posts on how to do it. But setting up the Angular server was a bit more problematic for me, as my good friend, Google, provided little help.
As our blogging efforts increased this past quarter, our Lead Content Whisperer, Jo, requested a mechanism to publish blog posts in advance. I was happy to volunteer to build a simple solution using the tools we already had in place.