There’s a thing writers call the middle slump. It’s that period in the middle of writing something when the author has lost initial momentum, feels stuck and has difficulty making forward progress. A post in the writing subreddit frames it well: “The beginning of your story is so far behind you and yet the end […]
Category archives: software
HBR IdeaCast Greatest Hits
You’ve probably heard of Harvard Business Review, but have you heard of the HBR IdeaCast? It’s a fantastic and free podcast that summarizes a lot of content in the Harvard business review publication and it’s been running for well over a decade. I’ve been burning through the archives and created a list of the best […]
Leadership Podcast Roundup
Another year, another podcast blog post. I’ve been binging on leadership podcasts for the last few months, and have hit on some new gems. The crazy thing is how many of these podcasts are super new – like in the last year or so. In particular, leadership content catered specifically toward technology and software engineering […]
On Testing – Part 3
Browser-based Testing In part 2 of this series, I talked about the lower levels of the test pyramid: unit & integration tests. In this post, I’ll be focusing on the highest level of the pyramid: browser-based tests. Browser-based tests are slow. Really slow. They run an order of magnitude slower than other tests. Large browser […]
On Testing – Part 2
Unit & Integration Testing In part 1 of this series, I talked about the test pyramid, and how to approach applying it in your testing process. In this post, I’m going to focus on the lower levels of the pyramid, where you should ideally be spending most of your time.
On Testing – Part 1
In this series of posts, I’m going to cover my views on software testing. I’ve spent a lot of time recently re-factoring some fairly large test suites, and would like to share some best practices I’ve learned a long the way. In this first post, I’d like to cover some high-level testing strategies and my […]
My Favourite Podcasts in 2017
I’ve blogged about why software podcasts are awesome and why you should listen to them in the past. In this post, I’m giving an update on my favourite podcasts in 2017.
Rein in the madness: Intelligently using wikis for your dev team
TL;DR Wikis are awesome tools. When used poorly, they’re like black holes; documents disappear into the ether. When used intelligently, they can be powerful, self-organizing knowledge centers for your team. On most large software projects, organization is key. Developers aren’t always the most organized people in the world (I’m no exception) and project managers tend […]
The Importance of Modernizing Legacy Code
The term legacy code conjures thoughts of dread in developers everywhere. It’s code that’s perceived (justly or unjustly) to be tightly-coupled, hard to understand, hard to change, and just plain out-dated. It’s an immovable object. The reality is, legacy code is everywhere, and it isn’t going anywhere. So why not make it better, and make […]
Truly rapid development of admin apps with json-editor
At work we have a lot of configurable settings in our application. Like a lot. For a long time, nobody tackled the task of properly exposing the management of these settings in a UI because they thought it would be way too much work. The settings have a flat unified structure in the back-end, making […]